My parents favored spruce for their Christmas trees. Perhaps this came from my father’s family living for many years in Colorado where spruce trees grow. My wife and I have carried on the tradition. The branches and needles easily lend themselves to lights to strings of lights, ornaments, and icicles. Their scent fills the room and, as I think I wrote elsewhere, conjures up a near-living presence from the tree in the living room.
One year, my wife and I bought a live blue spruce with the seemingly one-ton root ball for our Georgia home. When we took down our decorations on January 6th, we planted the tree in a shady spot in the yard. To our surprise, it flourished there perhaps because I often sprayed it with water or because conditions were accidentally right many miles from its high country range.
When we moved away, the tree was taller than the house. I’ve often wondered if subsequent residents have wondered how a spruce was growing in a Georgia yard.
Now we use an artificial tree to save money. It’s a Spruce, of course.
–Malcolm
Even though it was March, I drove downtown in my 1950 A4 Checker (for you young people, that’s a car, not an Internet fact checker) in a cold wind that raged drunkenly beneath black clouds that looked like they’d been painted onto a frightening sky by Salvador Dalí during one of his less-lucid moments.
Today’s young may not believe in that magic for as many years as we believed in it. Too bad: they lose their innocence so young. But those who are open to magic, family gatherings, songs, spiritual themes, and the beauty of decorated homes: whatever magic we can create for them nourishes them forever and is worth the effort.
When my father passed away, it fell to me to let people know on his Christmas letter list. The following Christmas, I heard from them because many of them knew the history of my life through Dad’s letters. So I added those people to my own Christmas letter list. They were up in years, so we lost them off the list year by year, and that was kind of sad, really, because while I had never met most of them, they were in many ways an extended family.
Children will learn the harsh truths of the world soon enough. Some say, their kids have a better chance of survival when they’re reared from day one in a boot camp-style environment with Pop as the Great Santini and Mom as the Wicked Witch of the West. I don’t agree. A few years of innocence made me stronger because those years taught me that strength and honesty don’t require us to wear cynicism and brutal honesty on our coats like badges of honor.
In a world where instances of child abuse and human trafficking are higher than many adults allow themselves to believe, some will ask how we can celebrate the innocence of any child by displaying Victorian Christmas cards or other positive messages of the season when many children are suffering. My response, is how can we not? We can’t solve the wrongs of the world by keeping quiet about what’s right with the world.
My sense of Christmas celebrations, though, comes from the magic of December 25th as my parents conjured the day on an always-tight budget. We almost always had a spruce tree in a corner of the living room. The ornaments on it had been collected for many years by my father and mother and their parents. Since our Christmas tree lights were often lent to the schools we attended, our tree about December 25th went up after the lights came home from school.
Some families seem to ring a starting bell after which everyone dives under the tree and opens his or her own gifts without paying much attention to what the others are doing. I like our tradition better: we took turns opening gifts as my father handed them out one by one. He engineered the whole thing so that the most spectacular gifts were opened last.
I admit I’ve played Diana Krall’s Christmas album a lot since it came out ten years ago. I like jazz, and she does just fine with a fresh look at old favorites. I doubt that today’s youth is concentrating on jazz, so their Christmases will probably be formed out of other memories while their children last year and this year and next year. I like Christmas, Winter, and snow, so my memories come from childhood filled with spruce trees and movies and songs created before I was born.
Malcolm's Round Table 