Looking back on a favorite Christmas memory

Pat and Pastor Pete’s first Christmas tree. Photo by Pat Van Dyke

I love Christmas! I love the songs. I love the food. I love the decorations. It all brings back such pleasant memories many of which we celebrate with laughter.

I love the See’s Candies but not the chocolate covered cherries or raspberry creams. When I was in 6th grade, I learned the trick of pushing into the bottom of the candy and if it was soft and had even a twinge of red, I quickly returned it to the box to wait for the rest of my family. This has served me well for the past 60 years!

Then there are the songs. I remember the Christmas that I lost both of my front teeth and my parents had me sing “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth” over and over again until all I really wanted for Christmas was my two front teeth so that I would never have to sing that song again!

But best of all are the decorations. I love the lights, the ornaments, the bells and especially the fake snow. After living in the Midwest for my college years and the first eight years of our marriage, I now am so grateful for the fake snow! Real snow is cold, slippery and messy. Fake snow is warm, soft and clean. Why anyone would yearn for a “White Christmas” is beyond me! A “Green Christmas” makes much more sense to me. When you are a child, you get bicycles, roller skates and jump ropes. As an adult you get cash! I prefer the “green gift.” I really think we need to push “Going Green for Christmas.”

When I look back, my favorite Christmas memory is our first Christmas tree. Our first Christmas as a married couple, 50 years ago, found Pastor Pete and me in Michigan and on a very limited budget. We lived on eggs and bread because meat was a luxury. We were both full-time students with part-time jobs which did not allow any extra funds to spend on anything. A Christmas tree was out of the question! Buying a tree for $3 was not even considered for one second — until the 24th of December! On that day, we arrived at the grocery store to discover that there was one tree left in the Christmas tree lot. It was a sad little three-foot tree with a crooked top, missing limbs and a price tag that said 89 cents.

We began to think about our plight. We were spending Christmas with just the two of us. All of our friends had gone home to their family, but our families were both on the West Coast with miles and miles of snow-covered, slippery roads between us. Heavens, even if Scrooge never came to his senses, Bob Cratchit’s family in “The Christmas Carol” was going to have a better Christmas Day than we were.

We decided to splurge and buy the tree. That meant we had to cross the margarine off our shopping list (butter was always out of the question), turn down the heat in our apartment and wear coats.; but we had a tree. It had a crooked top but it was a Christmas tree!

Next was the need for decorations. Before we left the shopping area, we went into the dime store, where you could sometimes find things for a dime and scoured the discount bins. We found a string of lights with two blubs missing, a box of 12 ornaments with three missing, a half strand of foil garland and an opened package of “angel hair” all marked “free.” Our final purchase was a treetop ornament and a bag of balloons.

Fifty years ago, angel hair was all the rage for Christmas decorations; however, I doubted if many angels had hair made of fiberglass that made you itch for three days after you placed it on the tree and would wind itself around the knobs of your nearby black and white TV. The TV which was hooked to an antenna on the roof. Whenever we wanted to turn to another station, Pastor Pete would have to run outside in the snow, grab the rope tied to the antenna and move it east or west, depending on which way the wind was blowing around the buildings in Grand Rapids.

We carried the tree up the stairs to our second story apartment, which was upstairs of a 100-year-old house, leaving a trail of pine needles behind and placed it on a stool to make it look taller than its three feet. We now had a five-foot tree! Next, Pastor Pete trimmed the top of the tree to make it look straighter and placed the trimmed branches in the open areas below. It seemed fine until we stepped back. We didn’t have a Christmas tree, we had a Christmas ball, a Christmas pine ball!

Being from California, we recognized the obvious shape of a tumble weed but figured that if any of our new-found friends here Michigan stopped by they would have never seen a tumbleweed and would never make that association. After all, they didn’t know what a taco was, and they never put thousand island dressing on their hamburgers; so if they recognized the “tumbleweed shape,” we could convince them that everything in California grew that way, pine trees and all!

We “decked our tree” with lights, balloons, ornaments, garland, and angel hair and a 39-cent treetop. That Christmas Eve we splurged. We had hot chocolate (made out of powdered milk because it was cheaper), chicken-fried hamburger steaks and canned green beans. After dinner, we went outside to look at our presents to one another which we didn’t wrap because two weeks before we had placed them on the rear axle of our car: two snow tires.

It was a good Christmas, a very good Christmas!




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