Oh Tannenbaum
I can’t have a Christmas tree without thinking back to Christmas trees of my youth and the memories of the whole tree process with my family. It seems like I should have some joyous vision of us tramping off, National Lampoon-style, into the woods to chop down our tree every year. But usually the tree process was much more of a chore.
My dad, being quite possibly the single most stubborn human being in the world, always thought my mom wanted to get the tree too early, no matter how close to Christmas it was. Sometimes we’d wait right up until the weekend before Christmas, which to my mom (and us kids) was completely unacceptable. One year, my mom, being a liberal hippie Gloria Steinem fan, decided it was high-time she showed us all she didn’t need no man around, she was going to get that tree herself. (GO MOMS!)
At this time, my brother and sister were too old to be bothered with family stuff so I clamored into the station wagon next to mom and off we went to the tree lot. We picked out a beauty, loaded ‘er in the back, and let the scent of pine needles and grrl power propel us home.
We got home and mom, bless her soul, got out the hand saw and started hacking away at the bottom of the tree. Sure, it wasn’t perfectly straight, but for a first attempt, not bad at all. We plopped the tree into the stand and admired.
Except, instead of taking off the recommended inch from the trunk, my mom had taken off about eight. Our tree was pretty, and very, very short.
Which is when mom - still trying to prove something here - sawed the eight inch piece in half, took the tree down, and proceeded to nail half of the discarded piece of trunk back on to the original tree.
We didn’t really see the problem with the situation. The tree was no longer a miniature but instead a Grand, Beautiful, Glorious, Girl-powered Tree. But when my dad came home and we relayed the story to him, he simply said “And how, exactly, do you expect the tree to soak up water now that it’s been NAILED together?”
That was a most excellent question.
December 19th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
That’s an awesome Mom story! I love when moms get on a mission.
My mom used to try to do things to the house when my dad was at work, so he wouldn’t know ahead of time. Once she bashed out all the ceramic tile around the bathtub, and had every intention of putting in a tub surround by 5:00. Except that the tile was so heavy once it came down that we couldn’t lift it out of the tub by ourselves. Oops.