I don’t ever remember a Christmas without a Christmas Tree.  But things weren’t working out this year.  First, we were hoping that our son and his family would come up from Roanoke.  That would have been great, but they couldn’t work it out.  So, no visitors to prepare for.  Second, it was early December and we were leaving on a cruise from December 10 to 21.  Not much time to put up a tree and decorate.  And for what?  An empty house?

I remember one year when we were stationed in Germany and all hell broke out right before Christmas.  There were all kinds of criminal investigations being conducted in the 4th Armored Division and I was ordered to go to Nuernberg and represent these alleged wrongdoers.  That meant that I would spend the week before Christmas 100 miles away from Cooke Barracks where we lived.

I went home and told Carole to pack up the kids, because if we wanted to spend Christmas together, it was going to be in Nuernberg.  It turned out to be a memorable Christmas.  In Nuernberg, we discovered the Christkindlmarkt with its excitement, bratwuerst and massive crowds.  The thought of being crushed definitely crossed our minds.  You only moved in the direction the crowd was moving.  And, choke points lived up to their name.

The good news is we made it home on the 23d of December.  Now, I had to find a tree.   Christmas trees are not foreign to Germany, but on the day before Christmas, the selection was almost nonexistent.  What I brought home, in the most generic sense, constituted a Christmas tree.  It was four feet tall and eight feet wide.  There weren’t many branches (Carole says there were six, I say at least twice that many), but at least they were long.  It was an ugly tree, but once the presents were placed underneath it, no one noticed.

When I was growing up, we had a tree that rotated.  Oh yea?  It was a big deal.  Keep in mind we are talking about the late 1940’s.  I don’t know how Dad did it, but he hooked up a washing machine motor and the stand rotated slowly.  No, it did not agitate.

The stand was about two feet high and covered like a round table top.  Since the rotating stand was tall, the tree could only be about five feet tall.  But it had to be full on all sides.  If a tree just stands there, you can put the bad side to the wall.  That’s what walls are for.  But a rotating tree can’t have a bad side.  So Dad would drill holes in the trunk of the tree and stick in extra branches.  These would be tied up with black thread.  It was an arduous process.

One of the advantages to decorating a rotating tree in you can stand in one spot and put the ornaments on.  It was mandated that we had to put the tinsel on one strand at a time.  What a pain.  I think that is why when our generation grew up, we did away with tinsel.

When the kids were young, we would find a place where we could select our tree and cut it.  One day a year was dedicated to cutting our tree.  For some reason, it was always exciting.  There was a certain risk/reward aspect to it.  Would we find the right tree?  Could we get it home without it falling off the car or damaging the car?  We paid by the foot.  The taller the tree, the more expensive.  Then, when we got the thing home, we would realize it was too tall and cut off about two feet or $20.

So was this going to be the year with no tree?  No way!  Our tree was packed away in two oversize boxes in the basement.  It was just a matter of lugging them upstairs and figuring out which one goes on top of the other.  After two consecutive years of putting the wrong piece on the bottom, I had idiot proofed them with markings so there would be no threepeat.

We have three enormous boxes of ornaments.  They won’t all fit on the tree.  But it is a joy to dig out the ornaments.  They have been accumulated through many years in many countries.  Many are like old friends; like the Rathaus in Frankfurt and the many Mickey Mouses from Disney World.  I must have a half-a-dozen nutcrackers and chimney sweeps.  They have been waiting all year to say Hello.

So I finished decorating the tree, then we packed our bags and flew down to Miami to meet our cruise.  When we got back on the 21st, the tree was waiting for us.  I probably need to start thinking about taking it down.