Illustration by Danny Elchert
Remember that Walton family Christmas special where all the grown-up Walton kids came back to the farm, hauling along their kids? And problems got solved and hugs got exchanged and the True Meaning of Christmas was made clear? And then at the dinner table Grandpa Walton announced that he'd always felt like a woman trapped in a man's body?
OK, maybe that part about Grandpa didn't really happen. That's beside the point. The point is that whether it's the Waltons, the Bradys or the Osmonds, on television shows Christmas Eve is always spent decorating the tree with the family.
In the real world this never happens. No one waits until Christmas Eve to put up the tree. My wife, for instance, uses the time waiting for trick-or-treaters to arrive during Halloween to erect the Christmas tree. By Christmas Eve in the real world, the tree in most people's living rooms has been up so long it looks like the desiccated scrubs left after a Malibu hillside wildfire.
If you are thinking that this might be the year to take a cue from TV, that you might want to have a magical Martha Stewart holiday evening with the kids, putting up that tree and singing carols and having a bowl of wassail, please consider this: First, you don't even know what wassail is. Second, it is a massively bad idea to put up the tree on Christmas Eve. Believe me. I've experienced it.
My father-in-law has a mortal fear of Christmas trees. It isn't that he thinks of himself as Janet Leigh in the shower and the tree as Norman Bates. But that's pretty close. His fear is that the tree will catch fire. He has never admitted it. But I think he believes a Christmas tree can spontaneously combust. One minute it's just sitting there, festooned with lights and baubles and silvery "icicles" (some of which the cat has eaten and is gagging on in the corner), the whole scene a picture of yuletide idyll. Then the next minute the living room looks like an oil-rig inferno.
One year, my father-in-law decided that in the interest of not turning the living room into the set of Hellfighters, there would be no more Christmas trees. Everyone was gracious and OK with this. Except, of course, my father-in-law. By midmorning on Christmas Eve, he would begin to feel guilty. The threat of a Tannenbaum flambé was outweighed, around noon, by the critical mass of possible emotional harm in depriving the family of a Christmas tree. So about noon each year, he would press a wad of cash into my brother-in-law's hand and tell us to go out and get a tree. "Just try not to get one that's been soaked in kerosene," he would say.
Yes, Christmas tree lots set up right about Labor Day weekend, and yes, they're on every block, especially in West County, where my in-laws live. By Christmas Eve, however, they are, shall we say, fairly picked-over. There aren't a lot of cheery families bundling the big Douglas fir onto their cars, the air scented with balsam and spruce, festive with the loudspeaker-distorted Andy Williams crooning about the hap-happiest time of the year.
Let me draw you a picture. Have you driven past a Christmas tree lot the day before Christmas and seen nothing but a few scraggly tree-sized weeds, unloved, unwanted? And have you gotten that momentary, pensive melancholy that reminds you the holiday, so anticipated, will soon be over? Now imagine how it feels to actually be out there on the lot, picking through those runty, misshapen rejects. The makings of a Hallmark Christmas card commercial it is not.
Along with my father-in-law's guilt and request for us to fetch a last-minute tree, one Christmas Eve brought about 3 inches of sleet, followed by another 3 inches of snow. We were on an abandoned tree lot, kicking and stomping at a spindly, defenseless Scotch pine, trying to break it free from its blister-pack casing of ice like archaeologists unearthing a wooly mammoth carcass from the Siberian permafrost. Our find spent most of the afternoon in the basement, dripping, tinkles of ice falling away along with the majority of its needles as it thawed, later to be erected as the moistest Christmas tree ever. My father-in-law was happy. That sodden pine couldn't have ignited if you'd decorated it with flaming blowtorches.
During another Christmas Eve we managed to locate a tree lot on a family-owned nursery way out near Valley Park. We were driving my father-in-law's pickup, one my brother-in-law had recently driven home from Mizzou in a blizzard. He'd put on tire chains for the trip. Halfway home one of the chains became partially disengaged. Rather than stop to reattach it, he kept driving, apparently hoping it would reattach itself. By the time he arrived home, one fender looked as if it had been passed through the blades of a garage-sized food processor on the "Liquefy" setting. Having also been piloted through several minor mishaps by both of my sisters-in-law, the rest of the truck matched the fender. It looked as if it had been purchased from the Joads after they grew too embarrassed to drive it farther west.
We wandered through an otherwise deserted nursery lot, debating whether those were Christmas trees or preparations for a bonfire. As we pondered one, the house's back door opened. The owner stepped out cautiously, approaching us slowly as he tried to decide whether we were there to rob the place or just vandalize it. He was eating a slice of pizza. (What is it with St. Louisans and pizza on Christmas Eve?) I doubted there was a wassail bowl inside.
"Help you boys?"
We asked how much for the tree. He looked at the tree, then looked at the truck. A beatific smile of pure holiday charity suffused his face. "Tell you what, boys," he said gently. "You just take that tree. Free. And you have a merry, merry Christmas."
We took it. And headed home. The family was waiting to decorate it. Grandpa Walton would have been proud.
