The holiday season is here. The air is full of holiday cheer! Seasonal carols fill the chill air, and you all know what that means, mon freres! It’s time to look for that perfect Christmas tree. (Feel free to sing along!)
At Waterman Manor we celebrate Christmas for me, as well as Hanukkah for my husband, The Yiddisher-Britisher, and our grandson, The Briteen. So in keeping with tradition, our holiday foliage is also fondly called a Hanukkah holly bush! (Goy to the world!)
Christmas trees hold a nostalgic fascination for me that goes back to my Grandma’s home in the late 1950s. She would put out a small village with colorful lights inside each house and decorate a big tree with all kinds of ornaments, tinsel, bubble lights, and angel hair. These last three were like the magi that kept on giving.
Tinsel of this era was made of spaghetti-like strands of aluminum that clung to every part of your body and clothing for days. (We wish you a clingy Christmas!)
The original bubble lights were composed of thin glass tubes with a liquid inside that bubbled when the lights became hot, which was very quickly. These were known to get so hot that they exploded! (Painful screams we’ve heard on high!)
Angel hair looked exactly like the locks sported by Orlando Bloom as Legolas the Elf and looked gorgeous on top of Christmas tree boughs. It was made of spun glass that would cut your fingers in myriad places if you weren’t very careful, which is why I don’t think they make it anymore. (We three stings need ointment now!)
The origin of the Christmas tree is not as pretty as the glittery follies we erect each December in our living rooms. Back in the days of pagan Germanic tribes, oak trees sacred to the Norse god Jul (pronounced “Yule”) were hung with offerings to stave off the dark days of winter. These often included human sacrifices. (It was not the most wonderful time of year!)
St. Boniface, in the eighth century, replaced these customs with new traditions of hanging evergreen trees with apples, symbolic of the Tree of Knowledge, and stars, referring to heaven, as a means to convert the pagans.
The weather outside was frightful so people started cutting down evergreens to bring indoors to decorate. In the mid-19th century, Prince Albert brought this custom to England when he married Queen Victoria, and she made it a tradition with all the trimmings so that Charles Dickens could write a charming story about it all. God bless them, every one!
Funny, but the name Albert figures large in my Christmases past when it came to hunting for a perfect tree. Finding just the right Christmas tree is a long-standing tradition in my family, especially once I was old enough to drive and haul the darn thing home in the trunk of my 1965 Ford Galaxy 500 beater.
One year my high school teen club drove from the Phoenix desert to the snowy northern reaches of Flagstaff to cut our own trees. (Baby, it was cold outside!) Our adult chaperones had brought a couple of chain saws, and a few people had tree saws, while I had our trusty old camping axe.
I found just the right tree and proceeded to do my Paul Bunyan bit, but it proved futile. It might have helped if I had bothered to sharpen the axe. I hacked away for an hour with barely a dent. The final call was made—everyone had their trees and were loading up the truck.
Tearfully I stumbled through the snow, dragging my sorry axe behind me. One of the seniors, Albert Garbanotti (I swear that’s his real name), asked where my tree was. Sobbing, I said I couldn’t chop it down.
“Show me,” he demanded.
Big Al Garbanotti was a bruiser of a guy who drove a Volkswagen Beetle. We used to say that he didn’t get out of his car so much as he took it off of him. I showed him my tree and handed him my axe. He gave it three mighty blows to the trunk and announced, “My teeth are sharper than this axe!”
It was starting to get dark and agitated drivers were summoning us back, so Al did the next best thing. He grabbed that tree mid trunk, leaned left, right, forward, and back, then yanked it out of the ground, roots and all! (Oh, holy night!)
A few years later, while in college, I spotted the perfect tree at a local tree lot. The guy running the lot was named Al (I kid you not!). His pants were too long and I told him I’d hem them for a discount. He said if I’d hem five pairs for him he’d give me a tree. That was, perhaps, my first Hanukkah holly bush having been sewn by Levi!
The final time I sought a cut tree was with my friend Albert Swett. (Honest—you can’t make up names like this unless you are Charles Dickens!) We stopped at a nursery to get Mom a tree but they were closing and I had five minutes. Al ran down an aisle, stopped, pulled out a huge tree, bounced its trunk on the ground to fluff it and pointed.
“That’s it!” I cried.
As we strapped the tree onto the roof of my Pinto hatchback, Al saw a fir at the entrance covered in tinsel.
“How much for that one,” he asked.
The guy, whose name was not Al, said he could have it.
“Perfect!” Al cried. “It’s already decorated!”
Onto the roof of my car it went. We looked like a giant topiary driving down Black Canyon Highway. (Away in a Pinto to Mom’s house we head!)
Mom is a traditionalist. This means no artificial trees. Every year I contended with needles sticking in my hair, fingers, and the carpet. Finally I could take no more and went with my friend Robin to a pool and patio store. During Phoenix winters these places become Christmas stores. We found a beautiful artificial tree, brought it home, and decorated all 7 feet of it. We also stopped at a tree lot for a couple of toss-away tree trimmings, which I placed in a vase.
Mom couldn’t believe how lovely the tree looked and smelled. Imagine her face when, on Jan. 2, I folded it up lights and all, stuffed it in a box, and stored it in her garage! She still uses that tree. (What beguiled Mom is this?)
A few years ago Mom repaid me with a perfect tree that she found at an estate sale. It’s one of those 1960s aluminum trees with a lighted color wheel. I surround it with a small village with colorful lights inside each house and it’s Grandma’s house all over again, except that now I’m the Grandma! (Have yourselves a merry little Christmas and a Happy Hanukkah, too!)
Ariel Waterman still hangs real mistletoe, another pagan custom. Send chocolate kisses via her editor Shelly Cone at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 10-17, 2015.
