They say that we don’t remember many things that happened before the age of four years, but there are brief flashes of moments from well before I was that age. One of them is a memory of a Christmas tree in the living room of the house where I was born. Since we moved to a different house the spring I turned three, and I never was inside that house after that, I’m sure the memory is from the Christmas when I was still three.
Like many houses of that era, the living room boasted a large front window with a narrow top pane of stained glass – nothing fancy, just a border of small squares in amber, red, blue and green. I remember lying on the floor, looking up through the branches of our decorated tree which sat in front of the window, and thinking that the colors I saw through the tree branches were the lights from the short string of tree lights and that they that had somehow moved to the top of the tree. In later years, that memory still puzzled me, and it was a long time before I stopped believing that there was some sort of real magic connected to Christmas trees, and especially to the lights.
We had that same string of lights for many years after that; only eight bulbs, shaped like large candle flames, in red, amber, blue and green. Longer strings of lights became available but our tree remained lit by only eight bulbs until my mother became enamored with a string of “bubble” lights that resembled birthday candles with tiny bubbles rising in their tubes of colored liquid. They did not replace the old lights, simply augmented them, as did a subsequent string of “snowball” lights my older sister insisted on. Those were colored lights encased in globes of what appeared to be Styrofoam, and all survived until the arrival of our first artificial tree – one made of aluminum which prohibited electric lights of any sort and had to be illuminated by a light behind a rotating wheel of colored gels that sat on the floor in front of the tree. I don’t think any of us liked the aluminum tree very much, except for Mother who enjoyed the end of tree-watering and vacuuming up pine needles that stuck stubbornly in the thick wool carpet.
Today, when lifelike artificial trees are affordable and available, many people put up their trees around Thanksgiving time. While this adds to the festive ambiance of that holiday, it tends to make the tree itself less special as a symbol of Christmas. And it certainly becomes less magical after it has been hanging around for over a month.
It may have been largely because we had live trees that easily became fire hazards after a week or so indoors, or it may have been the fact that I was allergic to them, but the Christmas trees of my childhood were decorated on Christmas Eve and dismantled on New Year’s Day. Such brief tenure almost guaranteed that their enchantment would endure and that we would fail to notice the
gaps in branches that had been filled in with paper garlands in order to have a place to hang an ornament or two. We saw only the sparkle of what gilding was left on the worn glass balls and stars and ignored the cracks or missing pieces on many of the others. We loved the blue and silver foil icicles that had been carefully removed and saved in tissue paper year after year, even though many had become shorter over time. Pinecones painted white and sprinkled with silver glitter as well as construction paper fans and colorful wreaths, Santas and snowmen cut from magazines and old Christmas cards, and other homemade ornaments, were saved from year to year along with the fragile store-bought ones.
We spent most of the afternoon of Christmas Eve decorating the tree and the front windows of the living room; then when winter darkness set in, the meager string of tree lights was turned on, and the ceiling lights turned off. Mother brought decorated cookies and cocoa for us to enjoy as we basked in the magic of the tree and dreamed of what we might find under its branches in the morning.