Dear Blog Reader.
I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. Thank you for all of the positive feedback about the 2016 Christmas Letter. It is always fun to collaborate with the lovely Miss Beverly. Usually, I write with very little revision (laziness). Thankfully, the lovely Miss Beverly didn't want the Christmas letter to go out the door without our best efforts. She did such a great job polishing and adding a great amount of sizzle to the initial words and ideas first spewed onto the screen.
Two weeks down 50 more to go. We finally took down the Christmas tree last week. Thankfully, we had not made a resolution to get it down on New Years day. That would have been a complete fail. We started. We took all of the ornaments off, wrapped them up and banished them behind the cold, but soon to be stifling hot, knee wall space in the attic. Christmas ornaments are long suffering. They wait patiently behind that knee wall freezing in winter and sweltering from April through October. Then in December we take them out and bring them into the environmentally controlled space of our life. They take center stage. They reveal the phases of our lives.
The first round, those wooden, poorly glued, lead painted, creepy ones, are nearly gone. They entered our married life first. Newly married in a town with a new Sam's club, they were an impulse buy when we realized how empty our first tree would be. Only a couple of that 24 pack remain. The freezing and thawing cycles loosened most of their glue joints and they have been replaced by better made ornaments from children and various handy people in our lives.
We have the macaroni on a cardboard, spray painted gold, preschool projects. They take prominent places near the bottom of the tree where stronger branches can hold their one pound of glue. There will be no glue failure here. Every year the school picture, being transformed with glitter and a bit of string into a guilded pathway thru childhood into the teen age years, has added to our ornament arsenal. There are the painted Santa spindles made by a friend who had gotten a lathe and turned dozens of spindles a little fat in the middle and of various lengths. They are some of my favorites.
There are chickens of various shapes and sizes; a testament to an incorrectly identified hobby of collecting chicken figurines. It was an honest mistake. We lived on a farm. We raised chickens. All of the Christmas letters has chicken stories in them. The lovely Miss Beverly finding a vintage chicken target game, to replace the one she had growing up, was the kicker. Yes, the chicken figurine fever burned hot and for many years. Dare I call it the chicken pox phase of our life. We have all kinds of chickens; glass chickens, skiing chickens, chickens with funny glasses and stars on springs shooting out everywhere. We even have a miniature version of the classic rubber chicken. Can you imagine that at one time in America, dressing our own chickens was so ubiquitous that it could become a gag that would be universally recognized?
All of the chickens, Santas, pictures, macaroni collages, commemorative college bulbs were put away (the IU bulb a bit roughly) on January 1. The memories going back in the box were as strong as when they came out of the box three weeks earlier. That said, we did not take down the tree. No, the lovely Miss Beverly and I have an affinity for a plain lit unadorned tree. It is very simple. The white lights on a fragrant green tree does try to push back the long cold darkness of December and January. In fact a couple of years ago, we became a couple of a certain age (read the Christmas letter for a more complete explanation) that lost the will to decorate the tree after getting the lights on that first weekend of December. It stood there ablaze in white light without a single decoration. Even the angel on top was banished to the decoration box that stood ready at the bottom of the tree for two weeks while Bev and I marveled at how much we liked our unadorned tree. It was all fine and good until Grace got home from school and thankfully decorated the tree. I write thankfully because I am thankful that she didn't get out the retirement home brochures or call her brother and start planning our incarceration in the old folks home because: "They are obviously losing their marbles. They aren't even decorating the tree for God's sake." I would have been okay with just the lights (at least for that year.)
Isn't it funny? We are all experts at our perfect tree. The entire time that the tree was going up and coming down this year I was thinking artificial vs real. The lovely Miss Beverly and I grew up in live tree families. Is that a question on the premarital counseling survey? Do you believe in real or artificial trees? I believe that real trees are about the real Christmas spirit. Artificial trees? Well artificial trees are the spawn of Satan. Yes, I think that maybe this question should be answered in pre-marital counseling.
I certainly grew up during a time when it was an annual debate. I grew up in a divided family. My mom and dad were both big live tree advocates. However, both of dad's sisters were artificial adherents. Both sets of grandparents were artificial tree people. My maternal side being converted over time and my dad's mom opting for the aluminum foil tree with the rotating red, green, and yellow light. Each year it would make its way downstairs from the attic fully decorated, set up and lit by that ridiculous light whose motor, that turned the tri-color disk slowly, made a remarkable amount of noise for its size and lightness of load.
I once asked Nanny, why she didn't put the lights on that aluminum tree like everyone else. She said that people learned the hard way that aluminum "trees" are fantastic conductors of electricity. So if you put electric lights on an aluminum tree and it develops a short over time someone is going to be electrocuted. I think that by saying 'the hard way" she had read a story of said person's electrocution. Anyway in order to maintain that UL seal of approval, the Reynold aluminum foil company took the lights off of the aluminum tree and gave us the three disk light.
Yes it was an annual debate. The newspapers would be filled with opinion pieces from the realists; the trees smell better and the artificialists; you are being a poor steward of the world's natural resources by cutting down a live tree every year for 3 weeks of decorations and an artificial tree won't catch on fire with those hot bulbs that we used to have. Yes all of you millennia's out there, we used to put 200 lights, each about the size of a spot light, on our live drying out trees. They generated enough heat that natural gas suppliers around the US would notice a sizable decrease in amount of gas used to heat homes. That much heat on a tinder dry tree in a house with a relative humidity of 20%, it is going to cause a few fires. Each year we would read about this or that family who had their Christmas ruined because their tree caught fire. We would all come together and help out the family. But I could hear my aunts mutter, "it wouldn't have happened if they had an artificial tree."
The debate hung in the balance at the Sharritt house year after year. For us, it was sticking a white pine needle into our big toe in July every year. To be fair, we had 4 inch green shag carpet through out the 70's. Those needles would burrow down in there lurking until we were sure that we had dodged the bullet. Then "CRAPPPPPP! MOM I HAVE A TEN INCH NEEDLE IN MY FOOT. WHY CAN'T WE GET AN ARTIFICIAL TREE NEXT YEAR." She would answer, "take it easy. It isn't that deep. Rub some dirt on it." She would go on. "We are not getting a fake tree this year. Have you ever smelled a fake tree? Of course not, artificial trees don't smell. I love that pine smell in the house every December."
It is hard to believe that I lived during a time when real or fake trees as the great question of our time. We have certainly managed to make the world a much more complicated place.
Take care.
Roger
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