Christmas Trees
By Ken Ely

I have outlived forty some-odd Christmas trees to this point in my life.
I'm fifty-five now, and if the math doesn't work, well, it's because two
of the trees were artificial. The first tree I can actually remember was
tree number four. It set the standard for all of the rest.

When I was four years old, we moved to Japan. We lived for a short while in a small cinderblock house, among quite a lot of other small cinderblock houses, that an enterprising Japanese farmer had erected on his land to accommodate Air Force personnel stationed at the base nearby who could not be quartered in base housing. The Christmas tree my father brought home that year came from one of the base fire departments where the trees had been treated with something to make them fire retardant. As for ornaments, they were not the sort of thing a family packed for a tour of duty in Japan but there were two items that I believe did come from the States with us: a lighted Santa's face and a lighted Frosty. They may have been acquired around the time I was born. Both were fuzzy to the touch and it seemed as if I had always touched them. That year, they were hung on the wall in the bedroom I shared with my brother. The rest of the decorations were new-bought at the base PX.

My parents placed the tree against a wall near the short hallway that our bedroom opened upon. We could see it, if we sat up in bed, bent forward, and craned our necks to the right; and we could smell it, no matter where we were; for the kitchen and living room were just one big room with a kerosene heater in the middle, and the two tiny bedrooms and single bathroom were not very far from the heat source. I remember well the ornaments that adorned that tree only because they decorated every tree thereafter until they finally began to vanish from breakage or from becoming so ratty that they were quietly retired. A few, a very special few, still exist, I believe; one or two remnants that have managed to survive because memory has made them glorious where time has been cruel.

The colored lights my father preferred were what I call the 'middle' ones: not the tiny, tiny lights shaped like molecular candles; and not the huge flame-shaped lights that are used mostly outside; but the ones approximately the size of arrow heads, of just the right proportions to beckon children to gaze deep into their colors to search for the source of the color, itself, like one looks for a landmark in the fog.

My father's favorite decoration was icicles. It was his delight, after all the other ornaments had been carefully hung, to stand five or six feet away from the tree and toss these narrow aluminum ribbons at it. As you might imagine, they landed among the branches in a somewhat irregular fashion; some knotted up, some draped like the garlands of fairies; but all lending to the apprehension that the tree had been dragged stump first through a narrow doorway. The overall effect was not of ice upon the tree but of rubbish. When the last icicle had been flung and my father 's attention was fixed elsewhere, my mother would carefully straighten the metallic wads out, and conform them to some semblance of actual icicles. He was never offended by this - apparently in his experience, this was the proper order of things for applying aluminum icicles to Christmas trees.

That first Christmas tree of my memory must have been set up on Christmas Eve without any preamble to whet my anticipation of its arrival. I remember my father asking my brother and me, as he put us to bed that night, 'Do you know who's coming tonight?'

We assured him we did not.

He suggested we guess.

After a brief conference, my brother and I ventured that it must be Uncle Ralph who was coming.

My father leveled with us conspiratorially. 'Santa Claus is coming, not Uncle Ralph!'

'Oh.' We were disappointed. 'When will Uncle Ralph come?'

'I have no idea about Uncle Ralph,' my father replied - which was very true, he did not, as Uncle Ralph was a seasoned drunkard and highly unpredictable. 'But Santa is coming tonight and he's going to bring presents.'

'For us?'

'Yup.'

'Will he put them on the bed?'

Upon being told he would put them under the tree, my brother and I sat up, bent forward, and craned our necks to the right to estimate the possibilities of this novel prospect. Suddenly, the potential for the size and number of the presents became exhilarating - to the degree that jumping about on the bed was our only adequate response. I don't remember calming down or drifting off to sleep - not the sort of thing a child remembers; but I remember waking later at the insistence of my bladder. Santa and Frosty had been extinguished. The house was entirely dark. In traversing the short distance from my bed to the bathroom, I made a passing appraisal of the tree by the reflected glim of a lamp somewhere outside.

More at my leisure on the return trip, I entered the living room for a thorough inspection; but I did not enter very far. I was checked in my progress by the tree itself; by the presentiment of an unknowable inherent within the obscurities of its shadows; and by a veiled goodness like that which is sometimes perceived in blue moonshadows on snow. I stood enthralled by the tree's profundity.

Gradually, a desire for a greater intimacy with the entire incorporeal spectacle stole over me. It was not that its mystery had abated; but by accepting the anonymity of whatever produced it, I felt increasingly free to move about within its depths. I stepped reverently forward. There were, indeed, gifts beneath the tree and around it - seeming endless dunes of them. And a little separate, as if they had suddenly materialized from out the gloom, stood two kid-sized red horses. They were wooden and were supported by springs in frames, like small four-poster beds. I touched the nose of one horse and it bobbed in a restless manner, as a real horse might if it is impatient to be out and abroad. Across their black painted saddles were draped two pairs of holstered revolvers. The grips were white and another touch of my finger told me that they were enlivened by some sort of decoration in relief and that the leather of the holsters was tooled.

Upon my retreat to my pillow and covers, whatever enchantment had put me to sleep earlier sent me thither again . My first presentiment of morning was the smell of coffee in the percolator. The tree was alive with lights and ornamental reflections. The numinous shadows were gone. The dunes of presents no longer faded into the impenetrable but were confined within the sweep of a definite radius; and tangential to its arc, the spring horses stood, even more red by daylight, and every bit as anxious as they had been by night to be ridden.

Ridden they were - hard. We moved into base housing and the spring horses were stabled on our front porch. By their third winter, they had begun to severely delaminate; and they had shrunk remarkably, especially my horse. When our tour of duty in Japan was up, we went to Hawaii in an airplane; the horses went to the dump in a garbage truck. As for the pistols and their beautiful holsters, my brother lost his on the playground while we were yet in Japan; mine were ruined years later by a leak in our roof while I was away at college.

I do not know whether it was because real evergreen trees were at a premium in Hawaii when we moved there or whether he simply was inspired by the novelty of plastic trees; but my father bought a plastic tree for my eighth Christmas. It came in a large box, completely disassembled, down to the last twig. Putting it together was the work of an entire evening, for it must have been comprised of 500 individual pieces. The box had 'Star Pine' written on it. There may be Star pines upon the planet, but I daresay they bear no manner of resemblance to that tree; for if one viewed it, before it was decorated, it bore an indisputable likeness to a tree denuded by fire. All the main branches protruded from the trunk in tiers at six-inch intervals and all the secondary branches sprouted from the main branches in one plane. Its design was more that of an elaborate TV antenna than a tree. Decorating it required a great many ornaments because all the space from the trunk out to the end of each branch had to be filled with something. This deficiency was made up, in part, by my father, who flung twice as many aluminum icicles at it - in the same spirit, I expect, that paint is thickly applied to gouges in woodwork.

The trunk was comprised of eight or ten segments, making it a singularly wobbly affair, which required my father to stay it to the walls with picture wire. The year he neglected to do so, it gradually slumped under the weight of its ornamentation until it fell over. My brother and I were playing cards near it when it happened. He chanced to glance upward at the tree, which looked like it was craning to see what cards he held in his hand.

'I think the tree's falling over,' he said quietly, playing a card.

Giving the tree a quick look as I picked up his discard, I said, 'You grab the deck.'

I scooped the discards toward me and scooted backward. He snatched up the deck and did the same. The tree slowly floated down between us with a muted, tinkley crash. All the icicles returned to the original flung-on disposition our father had imparted. We stood it back up and put books under two of its four feet so that it would lean against the wall. The icicles we left as they were.

Like a real evergreen tree, the plastic tree smell in the house was ubiquitous - only it was not evergreen scent, it was plastic. A little bottle of pine scent came with the tree; a scent which, when applied to the plastic, produced an odor like a disinfectant. It was a clean smell, but it was not a Christmas smell, and it was a strong smell. We only tried it once.

This absurd fiction of a tree served us for at least six years. Even with its full dress suit of ornaments and lights, it presented the eye with the aspect of a scintillating scarecrow; yet, I must admit that, when approached in the deep reaches of the night, it never failed to acquire the same ethereal proportions of mystery and benevolence manifested by all of its predecessors.

And what of now? Do I still pause, captivated in the dark by a mystery that alters Christmas trees and affords them attributes which - in me, at least - inspire wonder? Indeed, I do. For I do not think that it was any Christmas myth that held me bespelled as child; nor do I think that it is the memory of that experience that holds me now. Rather, it is the imponderable which makes me stop, when I am allowed vaguely to see it. And I am held by that transcendent impression that I believe God imparts to us all at Christmas, the impression of Goodness; and by a transitory but very real sensation of Peace.

©2003 December 15, 2003

Top of Page

Return to Short Stories Page