Christmas tree – Life In A Word

O’ Come Let Us Adorn

There’s an older fellow in Egypt who wakes up every morning, throws on a flannel shirt and well-worn pants, and goes to his workshop behind the corrugated roll-up door of a small, industrial warehouse. Using ancient tools and techniques, he churns out hundreds of colorful, ornate, square cement tiles. He’s a true artisan, our tilemaker, carrying on his craft from many generations before him. His product endures amid countless mass-produced ceramic and porcelain alternatives. Perhaps our tilemaker would feel more at home in Lauscha, Germany. Lauscha is home to dozens of glassblowers, who still create colorful, ornate, Christmas ornaments by hand.

Every December about this time, my wife & I bring home our Christmas tree (real, not artificial – see Is It Live or Is It Memorex? for that debate). We take our tree through the same steps from start to adorned. First, fresh-cut the trunk, set the tree into the stand, and fill with warm water (and one baby aspirin!). Next, let gravity bring the branches down for a few days. Then, bring out the ladder, top the tree with the angel, and string the lights generously down all sides. Finally, adorn with ornaments. Our collection is larger than the real estate of any Christmas tree we buy, so there’s always debate on which ornaments make the tree and which are re-relegated to the closet for another year of waiting. In the end, we stand back and admire a pleasing mix of homemade, school-made, photo-framed, and collectibles.

You can never have enough ornaments, and the glassblowers in Lauscha would agree. The process they use to create the simplest of glass balls is already beyond my artistic abilities. For one, you must work fast because the molten glass cools in a hurry. For two, you must have steady hands as you add color and detail. Have a look at the following short video and you’ll learn a thing or two you never knew about making Christmas ornaments. My favorite part of the process? “Silvering”. Who knew the mirror-like aspect of a Christmas ball is painted on the inside of the glass?

Germans (and more people than I’d probably guess) refer to Christmas ornaments as baubles, which is ironic because Americans define a bauble as a “showy cheap trinket”. Nothing produced in Lauscha, Germany is a showy cheap trinket. Then again, Americans figured out how to mass-produce Christmas ornaments and the result is a generic, sometimes-plastic alternative to the real thing. “Bauble” indeed.

The very first Christmas ornaments were anything but glass-blown baubles. You had fruit, candy canes, pastries, strings of popcorn, and whatever else you could find around the house. The Lauscha baubles then came along in the mid-1600s. Short of the post-WWII years (when the German government used the glass factories for more important products) they’ve been making them ever since.

Credit Woolworth’s once-popular department stores for the proliferation of Christmas ornaments in America. In the late 1800s, Woolworth’s started carrying the Lauscha baubles. Soon after, they stocked mass-produced American-made versions, taking tree-decorating to a whole new level. By the mid-20th-century, Woolworth’s was banking $25 million on Christmas decoration sales alone.

Hallmark jumped on the bauble bandwagon in the 1970s. Clever folks, those people at Hallmark. Their original ornament collection was made available only for the current year, followed by a new collection the following year, and so on. Today, Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments are so popular you have to join a club (just $49.95!) if you want to own their newest limited-edition ornaments.

As much as I’d like to add a Lauscha bauble or two to my tree, I prefer the more personal ornaments we hang instead. A dozen or more of them were designed around primary-school photos of our kids (“art projects”, they called them). Souvenir ornaments from favorite trips we’ve taken over the years. Several more with imprinted dates, to remind us of special occasions like weddings, births, or passings.

Five years ago, I wrote my one and only work of fiction on this blog, a post about a Christmas ornament. It seems fitting to include a link to The Best Branch on the Tree, assuming you haven’t followed me that long. Because, you know, ornaments – er, baubles – have feelings too.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Is It Live or Is It Memorex?

New Year’s Day has come and gone (and a warm welcome to you, 2021), which means it’s time my wife and I take down the Christmas tree. For some, taking down the tree means disconnecting the branches from the trunk, the trunk from the base, and packing the whole thing into a cardboard box to be used again next year. For us, taking down the tree means lifting it off the stand, hauling it outside to the truck, driving it over to the drop-off lot, and donating $5 to fund the recycling. Yes, this year – as with all of my years – the Christmas tree is real, not artificial.

I’m not here today to debate real vs. artificial Christmas trees. They both have pros and cons and your choice rests on where you live, your budget, and assorted other reasons. For me, a real tree is simply a tradition I refuse to give up. Picking out a tree with my family was a big deal when I was young. There was something magical about living in sunny Los Angeles and watching dozens of pine-scented snow-dusted trees being unloaded from Canadian railcars. Never mind we paid a little extra to have our tree “flocked” (adding a touch of spray-painted artificial snow). It was still a real tree.

Real vs. artificial goes way beyond Christmas trees. When I consider one next to the other, I always think of Memorex. In the 1970s and ’80s the Memorex Corporation produced audio cassettes, the precursor to the compact disc. In their TV commercials Memorex included singer Ella Fitzgerald belting out a note powerful enough to shatter a wine glass. Then they’d play a recording of Ella’s performance and the wine glass would still shatter, begging the question, “Is it live, or is it Memorex?”

Real vs. artificial also recalls Milli Vanilli, the R&B duo from the late ’80’s. Milli Vanilli made it big with the album “Girl You Know It’s True”, then won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. But years later the world would find out Milli Vanilli never sang anything. Instead they lip-synced their way to fame; their albums the voices of studio performers. Milli Vanilli returned the Best New Artist Grammy shortly after that.

Let’s visit real vs. artificial a little closer to home; say, the kitchen. As much as my wife and I seek whole, organic, locally produced foods, we can’t help including a few outliers. I just went through our pantry and came up with a few good examples:

Aunt Jemima syrup. This pancake topper – destined for rebranding in the name of racial equality – is nothing but high fructose corn syrup, water, and a whole lot of chemicals. The “Natural Butter Flavor” variety blatantly advertises “contains no butter”. You’ll find all the pure maple syrup you want in Vermont but you won’t find a drop in a bottle of Aunt Jemima.
Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts. A long time ago Pop-Tarts contained real ingredients (else my mother wouldn’t have put ’em on the pantry shelf as kid snacks). Today’s Pop-Tarts are enriched flour and a bunch of scary-sounding ingredients developed in a lab. It takes half the height of the box to list everything that goes into a Pop-Tart.
Kraft Mac & Cheese. Make a bowl of pasta, top it with melted cheddar, and Voila! you have macaroni & cheese in two ingredients. Kraft Mac & Cheese needs twenty-one to accomplish the same dish. But man, don’t it taste great?
Ritz Crackers. More enriched flour plus lab ingredients. (Maybe every food can be made from enriched flour?) The Ritz Crackers box includes a warning, “Contains wheat, soy”. Ha, if only that was all it contained.
“Real” Bacon Bits. My mother-in-law left this bottle of horror behind when she brought a salad for Christmas dinner. But guess what? It really is made of bacon (okay, and chemicals). I must’ve been thinking of other brands, where the bits are actually “flavored textured soy flour”. Oh ick.

Back to our real Christmas tree. After the gifts were passed around and opened, we discovered one more, looking a little embarrassed behind the branches. It was a brightly colored basket, the kind all dressed up with a cute wooden box and Christmas bow, overflowing with food items and protected in plastic wrap.

But here’s the rub. We opened the basket and found a whole lot of nothing. Generic cookies, coffee, candy, and a couple of cheap Christmas mugs, arranged carefully so as to suggest the basket contained much more. To add insult to injury, none of the food items were name-brand (except for a handful of Lindor truffles). The cookies and candy were made with a ton of artificial ingredients. The coffee was so generically packaged it had me wondering if it was even coffee. The whole basket made me think “Memorex”.

This is where I jump to a discussion about artificial intelligence, but your real brain needs a rest so that’s a topic for another day. Meanwhile, my wife and I will keep heading out every Christmas to tree lots (or the woods) to find the perfect one. “Artificial” may sneak into other parts of our lives now and again but at Christmas, we’ll always be keeping it real.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Lovely Are Thy Branches

Christmas prep – at our house – starts the weekend after Thanksgiving and goes all the way thru December 24th. I like to think it’s deliberate – taking a month or more to drag out the “getting ready”. Some years we’re rushed but the house always seems to get decorated, the cookies baked, the presents wrapped, the cards sent, and the food shopped. There’s always a dinner reservation on Christmas Eve; always room in the pews at the late, late church service. But what if – some year – we dispensed with all of that prep? December 25th would still come, of course. But it wouldn’t be Christmas, unless we had a tree.

I can’t think of a single Christmas in my fifty-plus years when we haven’t had a fully-decorated tree. Whether the lights or the ornaments or the angel on top, the tree to me is the ultimate expression of the holiday season. Christmas trees have been standing since the 1500’s (proved by a sculpted image at an estate in France). In the late 1700’s, Christmas trees hopped the pond to America.

My affection for decorated trees dates to my early childhood in Los Angeles. Late on a mid-December day, my mother would pack my brothers and I into the station wagon, drive downtown, and meet up with my father after work. Near his office, hundreds of Christmas trees were being unloaded from boxcars in the train yard; some of them still fresh with snow. You may prefer the convenience of your neighborhood tree lot, but sorry; nothing beats the childhood nostalgia of picking a tree straight from a boxcar.

Since we never had snow in Los Angeles, we often had our Christmas tree “flocked” before taking it home. Flocking means placing a tree on a spinning stand and covering it with a product I can only describe as spray Styrofoam. As tacky as that sounds, the result is remarkably “snow-like”. Flocking even comes in colors (but I never understood why anyone would want pink or green snow).

As for tree ornaments, they’ve been around since Christmas trees themselves. What were once apples, candy canes, and pastries (elegantly simple, if you ask me) have now evolved into everything imaginable. On my childhood tree, I only remember those delicate, shiny, colored balls and bells; the ones which shattered on the slightest impact. We also had tinsel; endless garlands of thin strips of colored foil, and tinsel is a great word, don’t you think?

Christmas lights became a staple of tree decor in 1882, when an Edison Electric VP first added them to his family tree. The lights on my childhood tree – the multi-colored “C9” incandescent standard of the time – were connected to an illuminated star at the very top. A few strands contained transparent-colored “blinkies”. In hindsight, blinky lights sound as tacky as flocking but somehow, they worked alongside everything else on the tree.

Here’s a little Christmas tree trivia for you. The carol, O’ Christmas Tree, is sometimes sung in German, starting with “O’ Tannenbaum, O’ Tannenbaum…”. Guess what? You’re actually singing, “O’ Fir Tree, O’ Fir Tree…”. If you’re looking for the correct translation, go with, “O’ Weihnachtsbaum…” instead.

One more bit of trivia. If you find a tree decorated with nothing but white and gold Christian symbols, you’re looking at a Christmon tree. Blend the sounds and meanings of “Christ” and “monogram” and you come up with the portmanteau “Christmon”. Sounds (and looks) beautiful to me.

I don’t think I’ll ever have to worry about finding a Christmas tree. Over 35 million are produced in the U.S. each year; another 60 million in Europe. The average cost of a live-cut Christmas tree last year was $73, and that includes a lot of really tall ones. Someday, I won’t be able to erect a nine or ten-foot tree in my living room anymore. No worries; I’ll just go with a table-top instead (a “Charlie Brown”, if you will). Her branches will be just as lovely.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

De-lightful December

The Broadmoor Hotel, the five-star luxury resort here in Colorado Springs, boasts a Christmas season display including over a million twinkly white lights. The weekend after Thanksgiving crowds gather on the grounds to witness the illumination, which starts with a countdown and ends with the flip of a big switch. Instantly the Broadmoor is delivered into the Christmas season. It’s a spectacular sight and a tradition that’s been carried on for thirty years. I can’t imagine how long it takes to put it all together.

Christmas lights are one of my favorite expressions of the season. I marvel at the time and energy some of my neighbors invest to produce a display that – like the one above – can probably be seen from the space shuttle. Surely you have a similar house where you live (or a hotel) where the lights and the decorating borders on the ridiculous. Or maybe you just tune in to “The Great Christmas Light Fight” (Mondays on ABC), where “decorating to the extreme” can win you a cash prize and the coveted Light Fight trophy.

We have a house in our neighborhood covered in nothing but purple lights. It’s actually quite appealing but I question the choice of color. Most people still use strands of multi-colored lights of course – more LED than incandescent these days. Sometimes you see animals or trains or colorful scenes. Those always remind me of Lite-Brite, a toy I had as a kid. Lite-Brite was a simple light box fronted by color-by-letter templates. You plugged colored plastic pegs into the template and when you were done, you turned off the lights and switched on the box to display a glowing, colorful picture. My more artistic friends would forego the templates and make their own creations in the dark.

I see Christmas lights everywhere this time of year; not just on houses. Traffic signals blink red and green. Ditto airport runway demarcations. And how about those overhead lights your drive-thru bank uses to indicate which lanes are open or closed?

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn the first Christmas “lights” were candles, glued with melted wax to tree branches in the wealthier homes of late-nineteenth-century Germany. Electric strands came along several years later (Great Britain claims their invention); originally referred to as “fairy lights”. Finally, several cities – San Diego, New York City, and Appleton, Wisconsin among them – claim to have originated the outdoor Christmas light display, which only seem to get bigger and more elaborate by the year.

Perhaps you’re like my family. Other than the tree itself we’re lucky if we string one hundred (let alone one million) lights on the outside of our house. I like to decorate a tree or two in the yard instead, but the house itself stands in the shadows. Perhaps it’s because I fell off a ladder one year reaching across the top of the garages. Perhaps it’s because I prefer the look of the “candle in the window” (so much easier to put up!)

Less is more in my opinion. One of my favorite decorated houses in our neighborhood combines a simple outline of white lights on the house with a few colored trees in the yard. That works for me. Even a single white light will do as long as it’s bright enough. So goes the Methodist hymn There’s A Song In The Air: “Ay! the star rains its fire while the beautiful sing…” Referring of course, to the star of Bethlehem. The one true and luminous Christmas light.

The Best Branch on the Tree

Gracie lay quietly and perfectly still for what seemed like forever. Her snow hat tickled her auburn hair. Her dress, with the oversized snowflake front and center, felt worn and wrinkled, though she couldn’t be sure with her surroundings so dark. Something sharp was poking her in the back. Above her, below her, to the right and to the left, Gracie sensed the color and glitter and shine of nearby objects. She couldn’t move to see them but Gracie knew they were there. After all, when you’re a Christmas tree ornament you know what it’s like to spend a year in a cardboard box.

Suddenly and without warning, a door opened. Gracie held her breath, as this basement closet was home to more than just Christmas things. But then she heard happy voices and boxes being shuffled about. There was a quick trill of sleigh bells followed by a friendly clack-clack of Christmas lights. Then there was a jolt – a bit of an earthquake really! – and the sensation of being lifted and moved. But it wasn’t until Gracie felt she was going up the stairs one at a time she knew for sure. Yes, YES – it was time! December was here again! Gracie smiled (though she always smiled no matter how she felt). In all her excitement she tried to push back the qualms; the uneasy feelings that entered her mind every year at this moment. Would she make it to the best branch on the Christmas tree? Would she make it to the Christmas tree at all?

Other ornaments slowly came to life around her, yawning and stretching (those that could move, closer to the top of the box). There was the excited chatter of anticipation. Who would be chosen first? Who would face the fireplace with its brightly decorated garlands and stockings? Who would hang from the lowest tree branches, where you could almost reach out and touch the presents below? And which lucky ones would journey highest, standing guard on branches just below the Christmas angel? “Oh, hurry, please hurry,” thought Gracie. “Let us out into the light!”

Suddenly all of the movement stopped. The box top was removed. Bright light filtered all the way down to the bottom, where Gracie lay impatiently. As the ornaments above her were removed, Gracie’s thoughts still wandered. Was the tree big enough? Did it have good, solid branches? Did her family still love her enough to include her?

At long last Gracie saw hands reaching down and removing the ornaments close by. Away went the Star of David. Away went the little wooden rocking horse. Away went the gingerbread man with one eye missing. Finally, the whole box was upended, and Gracie and the remaining ornaments came tumbling out into a messy pile on the table. “This is awkward,” she giggled, sprawling almost upside down. It would take some untangling if she hoped to get noticed.

To the sound of Christmas carols and laughter, Gracie watched from the table as one after another of the ornaments were carried to the tree and placed carefully on the branches. She had only just arrived yet the tree was already looking complete!

“Oh no”, she worried, “I’m a little girl but I am pretty big for an ornament. Will there be any branches left to hold me?”

Then Gracie heard the most dreaded words. “Okay, kids,” an adult said, “I think that’s enough for this year. Let’s stand back and have a look.” And sure enough, the children danced in front of the tree, so happy and clapping. The tree was complete and with the best of the ornaments. Gracie felt a tear form on her cheek. She spied Tin Man, Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy hanging together halfway up the tree; the perfect view of Christmas everything. Her Wizard of Oz friends made it to the best branch on the tree this year.

Gracie felt so sad, so very neglected. She wished she’d never even seen the tree. Why hadn’t they remembered her this year? Christmas could be so cruel! She watched helplessly as leftover ornaments were placed one by one back into the box. But just as she was scooped up along with a tangle of other ornaments, a wee voice cried out from somewhere below the table, “No, Mommy, NO! Snow Angel needs a place on the tree, doesn’t she?”

Gracie held her breath. Was she really a “Snow Angel”?

There was a long pause; nothing but silence really. Mommy looked down at the ornaments in her hands, pondering. And then she smiled. With a little bit of untangling, Gracie was lifted gently from the pile. She was placed in a little girl’s hands, who promptly marched to the tree and determinedly searched for an open branch. Seeing none, she slid around to the back of the tree, facing the windows and the snow-covered fields outside. “Here is where she belongs, Mommy,” the little girl said proudly. “Snow Angel will be the very first ornament to know when Christmas comes!”

And so, there would be a Christmas for Gracie after all this year. She smiled as she glanced at the branch above her and kept watch through the windows for the coming of Christmas (though Gracie always smiled no matter how she felt). Thanks to the little girl, Gracie made it to the tree after all. Come to think of it, she also made it to the best branch of all.