Childhood Memories of Buying a Christmas Tree

This is a revised version of a story that appeared in the Virginia Beach Sun on December 1, 1988.     

      Men measures their progression through time in many ways. As young boys, we cut our neighbors grass and as adolescents, we deliver their newspapers. As adults, we bring them their mail and sell them their cars and as old men we exaggerate how well we accomplished all of these tasks.

      For me, the one sure measure of time and my own journey through it has been the Christmas tree—or more precisely, how I have gone about getting one each year.

      I remember as a child, in Rochester, how my father and I would walk up the street to the City Service gas station where the man would have all his trees leaning on one side of the building. They would be stacked up in a giant heap making it impossible to compare them but nevertheless my father would hold up one after another, and ask my opinion.

     “What do you think of this one?”

  “How do you like this one?”

  “How about this one?”

  “Do you like this one?”

  Until finally he found one that he liked.

  “This one looks pretty good. I think we’ll get it.” My father would then pay the man what I suppose was a couple of bucks and then we would carry it back home. Not even the freezing cold could dampen my excitement.

  This is how my childhood search for Christmas trees went.

  In 1957, we bought our first car, a Ford, and thereafter the annual trek for a Christmas tree branched out into territory previously unseen and unexplored; at least by me. It also became my mother’s job to get the tree since my father did not like to drive. Hell, what need was there to drive when you could get everything you needed, including a Christmas tree, within two blocks of the house.

  We went everywhere in the Ford, generally finishing up at the Wambach Farm about a mile from the house. We liked it because they stood the trees up so you could better evaluate the shape. The City Service man never needed this marketing maneuver because he more or less had a captive market.

  In 1965, I was in college and had my own apartment with a guy named Gus. Gus was the first kid coming out of the vocational wing of Medford High to be named president of the senior class. There was a lot of contradiction about Gus. Of course, in 1965 there was a lot of contradiction, period. Not the least of which was that we celebrated the season of giving by stealing. There was something exciting about stealing a Christmas tree in those anti-establishment mid-sixties.

  We went out just about dusk and found a lot several blocks from the apartment. We cased the joint, if you can call a tree lot that, and found a tree we wanted. It had to be tall and full and straight and green. Most of all it had to be light. Like the James brothers or Robin Hood, we made our move and began to run. I remember a man yelling at us, but it was a half-hearted protest. He must have just seen it as another college prank by the Tech boys. You simply don’t run four blocks carrying a Christmas tree and not get caught.

  That night, we had some friends over, drank cheap wine and retold our escapade. Later, we strung popcorn, which I seem to recall was the only decoration we could afford. For that year, at that time in my life, it was the perfect Christmas tree.

  A few years later in Vietnam, in the barracks, my Christmas tree was a foot high artificial one that my family had sent me. That year I mailed Christmas cards to everyone back home that read, “Holiday Greetings from the 1^st Aviation Brigade.” It had a picture of a manger scene with a light shining down on it. The light descended not from a star but rather from a Huey gunship hovering over a manger scene. It was that kind of a Christmas.

  My father died in late 1973 and that year at Christmas time, a sort of transition took place. The task of finding a tree fell entirely to the kids. My sisters and I drove around one snowy night going to all the roadside places that seemed to be springing up everywhere until finally we settled on the old stomping ground—the farm.

  For the next couple of years I have no recollection of getting a Christmas tree. I was living in California at the time, a bachelor, and had no one to share a tree with—much less anything else. Besides December in Los Angeles doesn’t even seem like Christmas.

  December 1976 was different. That year I met Kath and we were married in December. A few months later, we moved to Kill Devil Hills on the Outer Banks. We bought our first home and that Christmas ventured out into the Nags Head woods to chop down our own Christmas tree. I think this might have been what I really had in mind back in college when Gus and I pulled off the great Christmas tree caper, but it’s hard to find a tree to chop down in the city. In Nags Head, it was easy and it was fun. We got a bigger and much unshapelier tree than we would have found on a lot.

  By 1980, we were living in Virginia Beach. Christmas that year is remembered not so much for the tree we got as for the Christmas tree lighting we attended at Mt. Trashmore.

The attendance at the tree lighting was sparse, as it was for most events in those days, and we had little trouble getting front row seats. The day after the event, we were pleasantly surprised when a customer walked into our bakery with a front-page picture from The Virginian-Pilot of Kath, me and our seven-month old daughter, Jessica sitting in the front row.

  That is how my progression as gone—from youthful excitement to adolescent adventurism to adult sentimentality.

  And what of Christmas 1988?

  Well, Jessica now has a brother and a sister. We will, as we have for the past few years, all get in the car and drive to Farm Fresh. This is how it will probably go.

    “What do you think of this one?”
    “How do you like this one?”
    “How about this one?”
    “Do you like this one?”

  Until finally I find one I like—or else it gets too cold to look any longer, and I say, “This one looks pretty good. I think we’ll get it.”

  Old hat for me, but for the kids, the first stepping stone on which to build their own stories.

  That was the story in 1988, but 1988 was almost thirty years ago. All three kids are grown up, married and with our six grandkids are well on their way to creating their own Christmas tree traditions.