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PLASTIC CHRISTMAS
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No more pine needles in
carpets, sap on your hands
of TheColumnists.com
In December 2003 my wife and I went plastic. And we haven’t looked back.
We bought ourselves a most glorious Yuletide present that year that will last us a lifetime--an artificial Christmas tree. It’s a symmetric miracle. Every branch is perfectly proportioned and arranged harmoniously in relation to the others; neither branch nor twig has ever drooped. And every needle stays green and abides where it should all season long; nary a one has decided to embed itself permanently in the living room carpet.
Even the ornaments hang suspended where originally hooked. None has crashed to smithereens. And the angel we purchased our first Christmas together almost four decades earlier impeccably adorns the top. She hasn’t tipped or toppled for three straight years.
And the lights . . . the lights came with the tree. Wonder of wonders, they’re attached in all the right places. No longer must Shirley and I cautiously circle the tree in tandem, layering the cords gently on branch after branch from top to bottom, always trying to maintain the proper distance among the swirling strands, but later to find them overlapping or tangled and too many red bulbs--or green or yellow--adjacent to each other or bunched up instead of being evenly scattered to compliment one another.
All we have to do is slide trunk part “A” into the stand, which, incidentally, also came with the tree, and then trunk part “B” into “A” and so on until we reach the top. Next we connect string “A” of the bulbs to “B” and so on and, finally, plug it in into an outlet.
The stand will even rotate, so we can see the ornaments hung on the branches that in past years spent each season in obscurity up against the wall.
Once outfitted with our ornaments that first year in our home, the tree was ready for its toughest test: the scrutiny of our 30-something daughter and son. Hallelujah, it passed for a real tree. Actually, the kids praised it as the most magnificent Christmas tree ever to grace our living room. It even smelled like a real tree to them, thanks to a hint of pine scent sprayed discreetly in the vicinity shortly before their arrival.
For half-dozen years or so previous, the kids, then in their 20s, had rebelled against the presence of a fake tree in the family home, even after they had left home. So we didn’t tell them the truth about the artificial tree until two days after they had seen and applauded it. The insouciance of their response was underwhelming. Not even a “Ho-Ho-Ho.” Just “Ho-Hum.” Probably because they no longer involved themselves in decorating it.
But there is a downside to using the same tree year after year.
We don’t, for example, get to drive up into the mountains to some Christmas tree farm on a chilly December afternoon and saw our own as we occasionally did when the kids were small. Or traipse from lot to lot in town looking for a flawlessly configured, seven-foot tree that we could afford. Or wash down the roof of the car to get all the sticky gook off once the tree has been unloaded. Or, once it’s set up, keep feeding it water daily to keep it from catching fire. Or slicing it into manageable lengths to be hauled away by the trash collector after New Year’s. Or spend the remainder of January picking needles out of the rug.
That’s some downside!
Our kids should have been around in the (G)olden Days, when I was a kid in the early 1940s. No Christmas tree appeared in our home in Kansas City, Mo., until late Christmas Eve after my sister and I were asleep. When we awoke on Christmas morn, there was the tree decked out in all its glory, all tinseled and ornamented and lighted by Santa Claus, who also had remembered to spread our gifts beneath it.
Every package contained a surprise, for we knew not what to expect.
Even after my sister and I found out that Santa Claus only existed if we believed he existed, our tree never went up early. It was an old German custom for the parents to sneak the tree in after the kids were asleep on Christmas Eve. With great-grandparents’ surnames like Klempnauer, Schulz, Otten and Reich on my dad’s side and Steuck, Moser and Strader on my mom’s (a Sutton somehow snuck in there), my parents continued that tradition until 1947, a year after we had moved to Santa Cruz, Calif., when I was 11.
That ’47 tree arrived unadorned in mid-December over the shoulders of my father and was the first I was allowed to help decorate. Christmas that year turned out to be my best ever . . . and also my worst. Everything I had jotted down on my wish list arrived. Unfortunately, I shook and measured and weighed every present under the tree and guessed exactly what each contained. There were no surprises Christmas morning. Not a single one.
I haven’t shaken or measured or weighed a Christmas package since.
But my best Christmas present ever came in 1968, actually arriving on Dec. 24. She was our first-born and we named her Kristin Lara. I was holding out for Kristin Noel, but my wife nixed that as overkill. So we middle-named her Lara after Dr. Zhivago’s true love. (We saw the movie on our honeymoon.)
Our artificial tree will have paid for itself this season, thank goodness. Our pocketbook can use the break: Christmas on the 25th, Kristin’s birthday on the 24th, and our wedding anniversary on the 23rd, this year the 40th.
Shirley and I weren’t very good at family planning.
©2006 by Len Klempnauer. The cartoon is from IMSI'S Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Dec. 18, 2006.
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