Christmas Stories

Remembering Years Past

Photo by Sandra Seitamaa on Unsplash

When you get old like I am, Christmas tends to be more about reminiscing than it is about this year’s holiday. With Christmas almost here, I am going to post memories of Christmases past. This year has been a roller coaster. I shouldn’t be here typing on my laptop. When my Cardiologist came into the room to give me the results of my heart catheterization he said, “I don’t know how you are alive.” My cardiac arteries were almost completely blocked, and he was amazed I hadn’t died of a heart attack quite some time ago. I had open heart surgery within days of the test results and after only one brief complication, I have fully recovered.

It’s hard to explain the feeling of being blessed to be alive and the guilt that I didn’t die when people close to me lost their battles with cancer, illness, and age this year. This is becoming “It’s A Wonderful Life” Christmas as God let me live again.

The first Christmas memory I’ll share is the year my brother and I got the family Christmas tree.

I was born and grew up in Syracuse, New York. The chances of having a white Christmas were 99.99%. The storms that blew across Lake Ontario and that reached Syracuse would start leaving daily accumulations of a couple inches of snow starting in the middle of November. When I was young, downtown Syracuse was still the center of activity, filled with holiday shoppers and decorations, bell ringers were on every corner and the smell of the Karmelcorn Store hung in the holiday air. Christmas was still magic.

Since our family did not own a car, we would walk up the street, where the local Boy Scout Troop sold trees at the Catholic Grammar school that I attended. My father would take all five of us kids, after my mother bundled us up, the half block to the school where the trees were lined up on the bicycle racks behind the school. We would pick out a bushy Scotch Pine after debate about “good sides” and “that one’s too big”, we had a tiny house, and drag it in the snow the short distance back to our house.

For some reason, one I cannot remember or have purposely forgotten, my mother wanted to get an artificial tree for our family. I’m sure it had to do with the fact that the local Boy Scout Troop had declined in numbers, mirroring the overall decline of our city neighborhood, when those who could fled to the suburbs to escape the unintended consequences of urban renewal. They cancelled their annual tree sale and since we did not have a car, it made our annual Christmas tree purchase significantly more difficult.

It was 1972 and I was in 5th Grade, my brother in 3rd, when our mother finally made the move. I saw the ad in the newspaper on the kitchen table. The hole that held the 50% off coupon told me my mother was serious this year about getting the artificial tree.

A woman she worked with at the grocery store down the street from our house, drove her to make her purchase. She brought it home from Fay’s Drug Store in a box that in my memory was the size of a refrigerator. We cleared the space in the living room in front of the picture window and opened the box. Inside was a tangle of oversized plastic pipe cleaners, wrapped around metal wire. The ends were color coded to match the “trunk” that had color coded holes. It took us about ten hours, minutes really, to read the instructions and put together this tree created by the petrochemical industry. When we finished, we stood back in amazement. Amazement on how tremendously horrible the fake tree truly was. The smell of fresh cut pine was replaced by our exposure to freshly manufactured carcinogens. I walked out of the room and refused to help decorate the, well, no one could call it a tree.

Even when it was fully festooned with lights and ornaments it still turned my stomach and steeled my resolve that something had to be done to save Christmas.

My mother worked at the grocery store until 5PM and our father worked retail at Grant’s Department store, downtown. He took the bus home so he would not return until my brother and I would already be asleep. We got home from Our Lady of Solace at 2:30 to find an empty house as usual, since my older sisters were always doing something. As my bother started to take off his boots and coat I told him to stop.

“Wait, I have an idea,” I told him.

I went into our bedroom and took my life savings out of my top dresser drawer, five dollars and twenty-five cents.

“Let’s go,” I told him when I returned.

“Where?”

“You’ll see.”

We walked down the street and trudging through the snow toward the public high school that our older sisters attended. One of my three sisters had told me that some club at the high school was selling Christmas trees. Oh, the horror! A public-school selling Christmas trees. Separation of Church and State. (Just updating the story to current standards.)

The tree sale was in front of the school, the trees also lined up on the bicycle racks. We started to look at the rows of scotch pines and a new luxury model of Christmas tree, the blue spruce. I held up a couple trees before a student came over to help us.

“You guys waiting for your parents?” she asked.

“No just me and my brother,” I replied as I inspected the next tree.

“You’re here to buy a tree?”

I was just developing my sarcastic sense of humor, but it was not refined enough yet for an appropriate, snarky reply.

“Yes,” I said, “how much is this one?”

“Well, the Scotch pines are a dollar a foot, so that one is about six feet. Six dollars,” she said.

“I only have $5.25, so we’ll keep looking,” I informed her.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think we have any trees under six foot.”

“Are you sure?”

“Let me go ask my teacher,” she said.

I watched her walk over to where a teacher stood behind a hastily built wooden shack that the guys in shop class must have contributed to the fund raising effort.

As we waited, I pulled another tree out and I thought I heard an angelic chorus announce that this was the perfect tree. The Boy Scouts never approached this level of evergreen perfection.

“Wow,” my brother said as he stomped his feet in the snow in an effort to stay warm.

The girl came back with the answer.

“Sorry, nothing under six feet. Wow, that’s a good one. I hadn’t seen that one before.”

“It’s the best tree I’ve ever seen,” I replied.

“Why are you kids here by yourself?” she asked.

I told her the entire story about the Boy Scouts ending their sale and the fake, cancer-ridden tree in our living room. I continued that it did not feel like Christmas at all, and I felt that I had to do something about fixing the travesty.

She looked at me for a few seconds and then smiled.

“Follow me,” she said.

My brother and I complied but she stopped and turned around.

“And bring the tree.”

We dragged the tree behind her.

“But we don’t have enough,” I called to her, but she just kept walking.

We stopped at the shack, out of breath from the effort with the heavy tree.

“Give me the five dollars,” she whispered into my wool covered ear.

I took off my mitten and dug into my pocket for the dollar bills. I handed them to her and then went back for the quarter.

“Don’t worry about the quarter,” she said.

I then saw her produce a dollar from her own pocket and she handed the now six dollars to the teacher taking the money.

“Six-foot scotch pine, six dollars,” she said to the teacher. She then turned around and smiled at me.

I was sure that this was the first time I was truly in love.

“Thank you,” I said. I resisted saying “I love you.”

“Merry Christmas. Wait, how are you going to get this home?” she asked.

“We don’t live far, we were just going to drag it home in the snow,” I replied.

“Are you sure?”

I told her our address and she seemed satisfied that we weren’t entirely crazy.

“Well, be careful crossing Genesee Street,” she said before she walked away and out of my life forever.

My brother and I began the gargantuan task of getting the tree to our house. In my memory it was at least ten miles, but I checked Google Maps and it was only 0.6 miles. We were buoyed by our enthusiasm of saving Christmas. That is for the first two blocks. The remaining five blocks rivaled the forced marches with full pack I did in the Army.

The last block was up the hill to our house, but the sight of home gave us the strength to complete the journey.

It took us about thirty seconds to get the decorations off the green pipe cleaner and to carefully return the color-coded pieces to the box. Somehow, we were able to get the real tree into the stand and standing in its rightful place in front of the picture window.

My brother and I sang Christmas carols as we redecorated, finishing about ten minutes before our mother got home from her job.

“Surprise” we yelled when she walked through the door.

She couldn’t tell what the surprise was because her glasses were fogged over from her cold walk from the grocery store. Then the scent of real pine hit her, and her glasses cleared enough to see my brother and I dancing in front of the tree.

She was speechless.

I proceeded to tell her the entire story while she still stood at the door in her coat and boots. When I finished, she just shook her head.

I don’t remember if she said anything because I was so happy that we had a real tree. Not only was it real but it was perfect in so many ways. I’m sure my mother was thinking about the money she spent on the fake one, because money was something we lacked in our tiny house.

That night, instead of going to my room I turned off all the lights and laid down on the couch to watch my tree. I fell asleep to the twinkling lights and the smell of a pine forest. I dreamed of presents and the pretty girl at the high school.

My father woke me up when he got home from work.

“You did this?” he said looking at the tree.

“Yes,” I said expecting a scolding, especially since he remained silent during the Christmas tree discussions during Sunday dinner.

“Good,” he said still looking at the tree.