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.

When we are born, we are given a name.  We are not in a position to consult on the matter.  We are concentrating on more fundamental issues.  And, most of us have that name the rest of our lives.

I envy those people who step forward and change their name.  I wouldn’t ever do that.  But, wouldn’t it be great to be a Rock or a Brick?  Solid.  I don’t know about Rock Rice.  Maybe Rockland Rice and I could go by Rock.

My birth certificate reads “Jack Paul Rice.”  Then there’s an addendum that says “Paul Jack Rice.”  Hand written on the addendum after the word “Jack” is the word “son.”  If I were the oldest child, I would wonder about my legitimacy (not that that matters anymore).  I decided that the answer is that you don’t wake a mother up after child birth and ask for a name.

It had been decided that I would be called Jack.  And that worked out reasonably well.  There was a time in Kindergarten when upperclassmen (1st and 2nd graders) would tease me at recess with chants of “Jacky Rice eats mice.”  Except for a couple bloody noses, I survived those episodes.

Until I got to college, very few people even knew my name was Paul Jackson Rice.  In college, a number of my friends called me “PJ.”  I liked that.  It wasn’t Rock, but it had a friendly ring.  “Hey PJ, what’s happening.”  I didn’t hang around with a very intellectual group.  We were mostly jocks and we concentrated on living up to our image.

It wasn’t until I got in the military that my name became a nuisance.  The Army had what they called a signature block.  First name, middle initial, last name.  There was no variance.  “Sarge, what about “P. J. Rice?”  “What, you don’t have a first name?”  So for all 28 years of my military career, I was Paul J. Rice.

When I joined the Army, you could read my signature.  But over the years, it flattened out.  The “Paul” is still somewhat legible, but the “J” has folded into the “l” in “Paul,” and the rest has ended up in a straight line.  I am not proud of this, but what are you going to do?

When I was the Commandant of the JAG School from 1985 to 1988, I signed over 10,000 diplomas and not one of them is readable.  A few hundred of them were for master of laws degrees and probably are hanging on someone’s wall.  A visitor may ask, “Whose signature is that?”  And the degree holder will say, “Beats the hell out of me.”

The only advantage in not using your first name is when the telephone rings and a friendly voice on the other end says, “Paul, how are you?”  You know immediately that the person doesn’t know you and is probably trying to sell you something.

When I retired from the Army, I became Chief Counsel at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.  The Administrator was named Jerry Curry and our director of government affairs was Jamie Fish.  The Agency was being run by Curry, Fish and Rice.

At NHTSA, I was permitted to change my signature block to whatever I wanted.  “P. Jackson Rice” did nothing for me.  I finally decided on Paul Jackson Rice.  The good new was that I didn’t have to change my signature.  I just made the straight line a little longer.  Since I am a stickler for details, I want you to know that even though you could not see the “i” in “Rice,” I always dotted it.
 

I quit drinking coffee about 30 years ago.  I don’t think I ever really liked coffee.  It was just a right of passage.  When you grow up, you get to drink coffee.  Since I didn’t like the taste, I used to heap sugar in the cup.  Two or three teaspoons of sugar and it tasted OK, but they had to be heaping teaspoons.

Well, I was at a Rotary meeting in Junction City, Kansas.  It was time to get some coffee so we could stay awake during the speaker.  I asked a retired general sitting across from me if he would like a cup.  For the next five minutes, I was regaled with his story about how coffee made his hand shake.  He quit drinking coffee and his hand stopped shaking.  You just got the short, less dramatic, version.  The story made quite an impact on me.  In fact, I was having trouble heaping sugar into my cup because my hand was shaking.

I know that none of this makes sense, but there it is.  Was I just reacting to a thought that had been embedded in my thick skull?  I just don’t know.  And, of course, when I stopped drinking coffee, my hand stopped shaking.  So no more coffee.  That meant I could never be the lead character in a fictional crime novel.

So, just like that, I became a tea drinker.  Some of my friends said, “But, tea has caffeine too.”  It didn’t matter because my hand no longer shook.

The good news, from a health standpoint, was that I was getting rid of those 9-15 heaping spoons full of sugar.  I could artificially sweeten my tea and be perfectly happy.

My choice back then was the pink stuff (Sweet’n Low) or the blue stuff (Equal).  I was disturbed by the label on the pink stuff.  All those lab rats  getting cancer from overdosing on saccharin.  And Sweet’n Low contained saccharin.  I didn’t know if they were feeding it to the rats or shooting it between their toes, but it was still disturbing.  The main reason I selected Equal was that the pink stuff had a sickly sweet taste.  I’m big on sweet, but not sickly sweet.

For years, I just drank Lipton tea.  It consists of black tea, orange pekoe and had become a friend.  When I would go into an upscale restaurant and ask for hot tea, the waiter would appear at the table with a large mahogany box and flip it open with a flair.  I would look inside but see nothing that looked familiar.  I used to ask if they had Lipton tea (later I would ask for orange pekoe).  The waiter would look insulted and I would become indignant.  Then, Carole would grab my leg and all would become calm.  I would pick out some celestial herbal crap and smile.

Now, Splenda is everwhere.  So my choice for sweetener is pink, blue or yellow.  I felt like Goldilocks in the house of the three bears.  This one it too sweet; this one is not sweet enough; and this one is just right.

When I am fixing my tea at home and trying to tear open the sweetener, it still spills all over the counter.  But it has nothing to do with a shaking hand.  I’m just sloppy.