What is green, glows, drinks a gallon of water every day, and tinkles all over your living room?
That’s right, the Christmas tree (but good try if you guessed my Uncle Martin).
The Christmas tree is my favorite 3,000-year-old tradition – the other is Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” Together they make an unbeatable pair.
For what would Christmas be without hacking down some half-grown saphng and throwing plastic doodads all over it?
Granted, some people buy artificial holiday trees. Contrary to popular belief, artificial trees do not help the environment, in fact, they have been found to be the leading cause of Toxic-Tackiness Syndrome (TTS), which afflicts more than 44 million Americans annually. A common TTS symptom is purchasing a plastic tree, “because them real trees can cost you a hunnert dollars EVERY year!” But soon the patient is buying plastic plates and uten-sils. Suddenly TTS sufferers think putting plastic slipcovers on the living-room furniture “is a good idea.”
So, stick with a balsam fir, Fraser fir, Scotch pine, white sine, Colorado blue spruce, white pruce or Black Hills spruce. Avoid trees that bounce, shatter, melt, or say “Made in Hong Kong.”
How to decorate your tree? There are two schools of thought on this: elementary and graduate.
The elementary school of tree decorating is colored lights, cranberry strands, popcorn strands, Fruit Loops, broken ornaments, busted ornaments, construction-paper ornaments, and colored lights.
The graduate school of tree-decorating (or “decorator tree”) often involves matching ornaments, white lights, or some sort tree “motif” such as “Victorian tree” or “Titanic tree.” Ribbon is frequently found in this school of decor.
Children, and here I speak from experience because I was a children once myself, do not like white lights and matching ribbon. Kiddies like color and as a tot I would have had a purple Christmas tree had my parents been game.
In fact, when I was in fifth grade, I decided to rewire our Christmas tree with flashing lights. It took me hours: reaching through branches, twining wire from extension cord to extension cord, avoiding my mother’s faux Faberge eggs, the breakage of which would have brought my short life to a quick and rather violent end.
That evening, upon the onset of an early December dusk, I stood in the living room, ready to throw the switch, amid a pile of sap and pine needles which had tinkled to the hardwood floor. I plugged the cord into the nearest socket and every light on the Christmas tree suddenly shone through the Murphy household – which was in deep darkness due to a massive fuse-blowing that, coincidentally, had occurred about the same time I lit the tree.
Unfortunately, my education up until that point had failed to inform me on the fundamentals of electrical engineering, especially that part about not putting a positive end into another positive end. That’s bad. And if done correctly, it can make every single “firestarter” bulb on your 40 strands of Christmas lights explode. Better yet, they all explode in sequence (in my case starting from the bottom of the tree and ending with the really swell finale of setting the top of our Fraser fir on fire).
My throwing a pitcher of eggnog on the tree might have saved it from arbor-immolation had my father not put a fifth of very fine Makers Mark into the mix. Don’t mention “Christmas lights” in my family. It’s a sore spot.
Living in New York, I just don’t have room for a tree. Besides, I’m a journalist and therefore a member of the media, who are all heathens anyway. So every year, I take a picture of myself in front of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and simply call that “my tree.” (Last year 1 got into a little trouble when I tried to rewire my tree to blink “Jingle Bells”).
In any event, this year, as a surprise, I bought a tree for my girlfriend. Buying trees in New York isn’t as odd as it might sound. In fact, the first retail Christmas tree was sold here in 1851 by a strapping entrepreneur named Mark Carr, who hauled two ox sleds loaded with trees from the Catskills to the streets of Manhattan. In much the same way my friend, who I’ll just call “Bubba” for the sake of anonymity, hauls a truck load of pines he cuts off of Interstate 65 every year up to Birmingham to sell for $50.
In order to set up a proper tree, first I bought the glass bulbs, tree stand, angel for the top, tinsel, candy canes, and 1,100 colored lights. Then I went to a tree merchant. I do not feel it is in the Christmas spirit to charge $20 a foot for some over-polluted, sickly, three-needle, Yankee Tree. Especially since my girlfriend has 14-foot ceilings. I let the tree merchant have a few choice New York Christmas greetings before leaving the lot.
“Leaving” is somewhat deceptive since I simply grappled the monster tree over to the curb where I held out my hand for a cab. You see, as a New Yorker, I don’t have a car. And the thought of taking a bus or subway with a 14-foot Fraser fir was not appealing.
Advice: when trying to hail a t cab with a 14-foot holiday deco-ration, it is best to hide said tree behind a pole of some description, hail a cab, and then mention that you have “an item” you’d like to put in the trunk.
When he pops the lid, shove your tree in real fast-like and hope that the driver attributes the o pine smell to his rearview mirror freshener. Should the cabbie I notice that his trunk isn’t quite closed, try bribing him with $20.
And should the 7 feet of Fraser fir that is sticking out the side of your taxi’s trunk happen to broadside some innocent pedestrian or bicyclists, give our driver another $20 to increase his speed.
My Hindu driver asked why Christians chop down a tree for the season. “Well ahem,” I said in my best historic voice, “said Christmas tree is actually an old pagan symbol. Egyptians brought green palm branches into their homes on the shortest day of the year in December as a symbol of life’s triumph over death. Romans adorned their homes with evergreens during Saturnalia, a winter festival in honor of Saturnus, their god of agriculture. Druid priests decorated oak trees with golden apples for their winter solstice festivities. In the Middle Ages, the Paradise tree, an evergreen hung with red apples, was the symbol of the feast of Adam and Eve held on Dec. 24.”
“Uh, never mind. Christians just like to chop down trees, OK?”
My girlfriend was really surprised by her tree; and it looks OK now, that it’s been decorated.
Even if it’s missing a few branches, has a bald top, and a bicycle helmet for a star.