Dec 12, 2022 5 min read

Of all of the traditions that are used to celebrate Christmas none is as universal as displaying a Christmas tree. From Rockefeller Center to the White House to the finale of a “Charlie Brown Christmas,” the holiday could not occur in our imagination without a brightly decorated evergreen to admire.

The credit for popularizing this relatively modern-day tradition belongs to Germany. We can thank our Teutonic cousins who, probably after consuming an enormous amount of beer, had the idea to chop down a spruce tree, drag it inside and adorn it with actual lighted candles. What could go wrong? The first recorded instance of a Christmas tree being displayed was in the 1830s here in Pennsylvania by who else but German settlers. Face forward to the 20th century and the process of continuing this Germanic custom in the modern world takes on a rigid set of steps that are adhered to annually.

Selection and purchase

It’s hard to pick a favorite scene from the now-beloved holiday movie “A Christmas Story,” but the family traveling by car to a vacant lot illuminated by strings of bare lightbulbs to buy a Christmas tree is straight out of my childhood. Here in Washington there was a long, open-air building in my neighborhood known simply as “the produce,” where fruits and vegetables were sold, and every December it was transformed into a Christmas tree lot. Long rows of balsams, frasers and scotch pines were leaned against makeshift wooden stands and my family walked among them looking for the perfect tree.

My father looked for the one that would be the easiest to get into the stand (more on that later). This is the memory that came back to me this year as my wife and I tried to buy a tree from a local nursery, as we always have, but found that those in our immediate area are no longer there. Feeling the pressure to get this purchase made we went to a big-box home improvement store. This transaction had all the charm and warmth of buying a door knob and a tube of liquid nails.

Something of the tree-buying experience is lost when the kid trying to check you out has to root through similar looking trees hoping to find a bar code to scan because he has no idea how much to charge you.

My wife, ever the sentimentalist, would always ask the workers at the nurseries and farms to cut off a small round piece from the bottom of the trunk and then mark the date with a Sharpie pen to memorialize the season. This year I was forced to try to cut it off with a miter saw and was thwarted by pine sap and rust. I will attempt to dislodge the remainder of the keepsake at the end of the season.

The stand and decorations

Circling back to memories of my father, when you leave home you begin to have a true appreciation of all the things your parents did that now fall to you – paying the mortgage, changing the furnace filters and every Christmas putting up the tree.

In my mind’s eye I can still see my father lying on his back trying to attach a Christmas tree stand that had to be invented by a Christmas-hating sadist. This thing consisted of three metal hooks and turnbuckles that expanded or contracted said hooks so that they would lock the tree in place. My father fought with this contraption year after year while a steady stream of profanity issued from his mouth. The beginning of the Christmas season in my house was more Tarantino than Hallmark, and looking back now I completely understand my father’s frustration. I think one of the happiest days of his life was when he threw that thing in the trash and replaced it with a green plastic tube that had four simple screws.

My father was not alone in his frustrated efforts to set up the perfectly aligned Christmas tree, and some of these struggles were hilarious. Take, for example, a man in our circle who had his family stand the tree up in his living room while he went to the basement and tried to approximate the location of the tree so he could drive a nail through the floor and secure the tree to it. Only Christmas can make what I just described seem like a reasonable solution to erecting a Christmas tree.

As far as decorating the tree it may not be politically correct, but I believe this is best left to women. If men were in charge of decorating Christmas trees they would have one large tangled ball of lights thrown on haphazardly and a beer can with a hole punched in the bottom shoved on top. Close enough. My wife creates a beautiful tree every year and she will add and subtract to it until it’s absolutely perfect … by Jan. 2, when I’ll dismantle it and drag it to the curb, leaving behind about 8 million pine needles.

Joy

When it’s all said and done Christmas trees are ultimately like brides and babies: You never see an ugly one, and they represent the joy of the season. By mid-December I’m in the Christmas spirit, and when I walk through the door at night the Christmas tree is to my right. The scent of pine fills the air and the colored lights create a warm glow throughout the room. It is home, and I am grateful.

Merry Christmas.

Joe Manning is a resident of Washington.