Oh (fake) Christmas tree

I’ve decided there are two kinds of people in this world – pro-artificial Christmas trees and anti-fake trees. For the first part of my life, I was pro, then I turned and joined the ranks of the anti. Now, I’m back with the pro.
When I was growing up, the Kehoe family, as far as I knew, was the only family in town that had an artificial tree. My mother made the great decision to go “green” before it was popular. She always was cutting edge.

My mom’s decision was not out of concern for the environment, or to save a tree. It was out of necessity.
See, she still had visions of my dad nailing a Christmas tree to our living room wall (which, by the way, is plaster).

She had just gotten home from the hospital after giving birth to her fourth child. She spent her days washing diapers (no disposable), sterilizing bottles, and chasing after 3 older children who were barely out of diapers themselves. Yet, on this particular day leading up to Christmas, she found herself abandoning diapers, bottles and children to hold the tree while my dad nailed it to the wall.

My dad was a great man in many, many ways. He was not a great handyman. So, that fateful year, when he picked out a tree with a “crooked spine,” as my mom says, it had nightmare written all over it.

He first tried securing the tree by putting it in a bucket of cement. And to think that didn’t work. Then came out the hammer and nails. When my mom saw my dad’s friend coming up the walk, she thought she was saved from this Christmas nightmare. She was wrong. He came to our house to tell my dad about his hemorrhoids. This is not a lie. He also brought along one of those donut things people suffering from hemorrhoids sit on. And there he sat, watching this Christmas magic unfold.

The real miracle of this day is not that the tree finally found an upright spot in the corner of the living room – after hours and hours of my mom holding it steady while my dad hammered the needles off of it. No, the real miracle is that my mom didn’t shove that donut thing down my dad’s friend’s throat.

That was more than 50 years ago, yet my mother tells this story like it happened yesterday – with much of the anger she felt that very day.

After my dad died, my mother did everything she could to protect her children from the hurts and frustrations that this world can sometimes bring. The best way to shield her three boys, come Christmas time, was to buy an artificial tree. She figured they were too young to be exposed to such a losing endeavor as to put up a real tree.
So, off we went to Sears Garden Center. We bought the tree that would stand in our living room for more than 20 years. I was pretty young, so it’s the only tree I remember. Artificial meant nothing to me. It’s just what I knew to symbolize Christmas.

When I got married, my husband was a staunch anti. I just assumed we would get a fake tree. No way. In fact, he got the biggest tree he could find. If I recall, it took up most of the living room floor space, and required approximately 50 strands of light to adequately light it. It was obscene.

During the early years of our family life, when Kaitlyn and Tommy were very young, getting a tree was a fun adventure. When my kids were old enough to realize they couldn’t stand each other, getting a tree was something I absolutely dreaded. Finally, with the arrival of Matthew, I had an excuse to stay home while my husband and older kids argued over which tree to bring home.

But the frustrations of a real tree didn’t end with the purchase, of course. My husband was experienced enough to check “the spine” before purchasing, so putting the tree up usually wasn’t a problem. Except the year, when Tommy was just a few months old, the tree fell -- right after I had picked him up from the blanket he was playing on – right under the tree. Talk about divine intervention. There was no intervention, however, when my sister and I got stuck in the doorway trying to get the tree out to the porch. Lucy and Ethel could have learned a thing or two from that scenario.