The perfect tree

I’m putting politics and other guff aside for this week in favour of saying Merry Christmas. Not “Happy Holidays” or “Festive Fun” or “Best of the Season” but “Merry Christmas. I’m one of those folks who doesn’t have a lot of internal dialogue and “Merry Christmas” is what it’s all about for me. I’ve had a lot of really great Christmases, here in the County. None of them perfect in spite of my best attempts to make them so. Even with the help of untold numbers of authorities on the holiday, my best Christmases have always been fraught with mistletoe mishaps, tree disasters and tinsel troubles. All frustrating. All funny. All of it “just the way the shortbread crumbles.”

Our first Christmas in the County was in 1972. We lived in a great big, old farm house we had rented just outside of Picton. Because we weren’t “County” yet, we opened a few gifts on the 21st of December, then packed the car and headed to Toronto the next day, for two weeks of too much fun, too much noise, too much food and too many drinks. Because we didn’t stay in the County during the early years, we had an artificial tree. A tree with 20 “almost real” boughs. Our “almost real” tree was always green when we returned on January 2 and our home hadn’t suffered from spontaneous Christmas Combustion. It took years to finally get around to spending Christmas at home in the County and when we did, we went hunting for a real tree. The real trees caused the most angst when we, as young parents, needed it least.

Each year Christmas in the County would bring out the best and the worst in LOML and I as parents and having an uncooperative tree didn’t help. It was in the early 1990s we found the most perfect Christmas tree. A special green plastic saucer-like stand was purchased to accommodate the behemoth. And there it stood, a 10-foot-tall beauty so big around we had to move furniture when it finally relaxed its boughs. We should have known then. For a brief moment, “the tree” was too perfect. We headed up to the storage room to retrieve the bins of decorations and lights. As we did, we heard a tremendous crash. Both of us sang out a litany of profanities aimed at two teenaged boys and a six-year-old girl—all given to roughhousing in the livingroom—as we rushed downstairs. The Perfect Tree was sprawled across the living and dining rooms; two litres of water seemed like two gallons as it rapidly spread across the hardwood, puddling in the carpets. No kids in sight. Mmmm. A tree with a mind of its own.

Over the next seven days, The Perfect Tree fell no less than three times every day and several times in the middle of the night. Our tempers were getting frayed as decorations flew, twinkle-lights lost their twinkle, water puddled and tinsel found its way into every corner of the room. A variety of structures were designed and built to keep The Perfect Tree in its proper place. Concrete blocks, plywood, rope, wires, nails and screws were knotted, screwed, looped and plopped into service. All to no avail. On the twenty-third of December, I’d had enough and with a maniacal laugh began to de-decorate The Perfect Tree. My family watched in horror as LOML and I dragged TPT out into the side yard and un-Merry-Christmas- like jammed it into a pile of snow beside the driveway. Our six-year-old daughter was almost inconsolable. “How would Santa leave gifts?” And then I remembered the artificial tree in the storage room with its twenty “almost real” boughs waiting all those years for a bit of recognition. It was dusted off, decorated and pronounced, “The Perfect Understudy Tree.”

We still laugh about that Christmas. We laugh harder when we tell people how The Perfect Tree stood, perfectly upright in the snowdrift beside the driveway until well into March. And we almost leave a puddle on the carpets when we tell folks about how the door on the oven fell off as I basted the turkey on Christmas Day, the same year.

I hope your Merry Christmas is perfect or, failing that, Santa brings you a sense of humour.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca