At our house we don’t have a holiday tree or a seasonal tree, but a Christmas tree. This past week I was talking to one of my sisters and we were reminiscing about our childhood christmas trees.

You see, we didn’t go to the basement or attic and dig out a large box with a big green artificial tree in it. We headed out to what we knew as the “new ground” because that was where the best cedar trees were.

We went across the road, my sisters and I, when we were big enough, by ourselves, to work the hand saw. We looked at all the cedar trees to make sure they were nice and full all the way around because you didn’t want a tree with a flat side.

At that time, this was the kind of tree everyone had, all the neighbors. When we went to our family get togethers that is what we had.

We would start sawing the trunk of the tree until we got it cut down. Now we weren’t John Walton, but we got the job done. Sometimes after we got it home we had to cut some more off of it because it wouldn’t fit through the door or where mom had picked out for it to go.

We put the tree in one of those metal frames that had the little bowl for water, you had to keep water in it to keep it from drying out. One year I think we had about three different trees because we started putting them up so early they would all dry out and not be safe from a fire hazard. That cedar smelled so good, but the needles on the floor made a real mess.

We would put Christmas music on, and sometimes we even put the ornaments in our ears for earrings. My mom would pop us popcorn and we would string it and put it on the tree. We also made those wonderful paper chains.

The lights were those big colorful bulbs, not the fancy clear ones like today, and no tree was ever complete without a box of those shiny plastic icicles. We would cover the tree in them, and those things would be everywhere,. When you ran the vacuum it would be full of them.

Those Christmas trees weren’t about fitting in with home decor, they were about us kids and the magic that those Christmas trees brought. I remember one Christmas I got a bicycle, and my parents let me ride it in the house, not that we had plenty of room to ride, but I was so excited and it was too cold outside so they let us ride inside. I would bump the handle bars in the hallway riding down there.

They have let us bounce basketballs and build forts, and play with the all time favorite “box”. That is what Christmas was all about.

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time to those sweet childhood memories, but I know I can’t. I try to make the Christmases with my family as special as those times I had.

We haven’t gone out and manhandled the tree yet, but each year we decorate a gingerbread house and this year each of my girls decorated one of their own, so I told them we have our own subdivision.

So as you go down to the basement or up to the attic to retrieve your artificial tree without the sweet smell or needles stuck in your hair, share your memories with your children of your childhood and how you decorated your tree. It’s not about whether the tree is artificial or real, its about all that sweet time together and the fun to be had, so happy decorating!

Tammy Waid McClellan

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