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By JEFFERSON WEAVER
As I write these words, we don’t yet have a Christmas tree.
That’s not unusual in the Weaver household; I have to admit, Miss Rhonda and I have decorated many a tree on Christmas Eve, sometimes with sap still dripping from my axe, and other times when the tree-dealers were letting everything go for next to nothing.
It took years for my father to be willing to go to a tree farm to actually purchase a tree; even then, he preferred tree farms where the crop wasn’t perfectly coiffed and shaped.
For the first three decades of my life, we went tree hunting.
It was always a Saturday, generally a week before Christmas. Mother would fix a breakfast capable of sustaining a small army, and Papa, Michael and myself would hit the road.
For years we went to the farms of Mr. Vaden or “Uncle Ralph” Lucas. It was at Uncle Ralph’s one tragic year when I lost my brother’s big sheath knife. Naturally, that loss happened the first time everyone, especially Michael, agreed I was old enough to carry something other than my Barlow.
We must have taken a score of trees from Uncle Ralph’s, starting the year after I was born. One year it snowed while we were searching for the tree; we have several black and white photos from that year. They show me on the back of old Molly the Mule, who with a retired plow horse helped drag our tree out of the woods. A toddling version of This Writer appears in one of the photos as a heavily bundled ball of flannel, precariously balanced atop my friend Molly’s bony back.
While we lived on Ralph’s farm, our trees always came from there. Each year, Papa and Brother Mike crossed the road from our house, went through the cow pasture, and found the perfect pine along a treeline a half-mile away. That line of little trees produced a decade worth of Christmas trees for our family.
The last time we raided that grove, the wind was spitting ice crystals and the pickings were slim. As the sun went down, Papa and Uncle Ralph made an executive decision that we should put two trees together, since most of the remaining candidates were nicely formed on one side, but nearly naked on the other.
Mother was not pleased when we brought the sorry looking loblollies into the house. Papa, however, was determined to make it work, and with some judicious use of wire and woodscrews, he produced a Christmas miracle.
It filled one corner of the living room, and Mother actually did love the final result.
It was on a Christmas tree hunt that Papa let me drive on a highway for the first time. I’d gone maybe two miles when we spotted a state trooper who knew Papa, knew me, and knew I wasn’t old enough to drive. The trooper never said a word; he just waved while we pulled down a dirt road and swiftly changed drivers.
Christmas was never the same at Mother’s house after the Old Man died; we couldn’t seem to muster the urgency that Papa always led when he was on the quest for the perfect tree. Still, Mother would fight her way through the lights and boxes of decorations, swearing that next year everything would be better organized. As I have related before, the tree was never finished until Mother hung her trashcan angel in a prominent place.
Through the years, Miss Rhonda and I have had our own Christmas tree adventures; there was the year of the fireant attack, the time she was dreadfully, horribly sick but determined to help drag the tree in through the rain, and the year of the mailbox tree.
We lived across a country road from a tumble-down country store, one long closed and forgotten except as a landmark to people in their 80’s. Our mailbox stood in front of the store, and there was a cedar tree growing beside the mailbox post.
It was around dark on Christmas Eve when we finally managed to start looking for our own tree. I’d been out of work for a while, and money was too tight even for a cut-rate grocery store tree. Young married pride forbade us from asking for more help from our parents.
Try as I might, I couldn’t find a tree in all the woods around our place. I refused to cut the mailbox tree, since it was too pretty to be wasted.
Finally, as Rhonda was approaching tears and I was cursing myself, I gave up and cut down the mailbox tree. The parlor of our old house welcomed the tree, and by midnight the room looked and smelled like Christmas.
For a week or more, I had some regrets about cutting down the tree. Right after the first of the year the state decided the logging trucks using our road needed wider lanes. Had we not cut the tree when we did, it would have been just another piece of debris tossed aside by the state road crew.
By the time you read this, we’ll have found this year’s tree; it may be a sad little Charlie Brown Christmas tree, one that just needs some love and attention, a leftover from a Christmas tree lot.
It may be one of my friend Richard’s trees, a cedar or cypress plucked from a field of trees whose main purpose seems to be giving Richard and Miss Amanda an excuse to get outside, visit with people and spread some holiday cheer.
It might even be two pines with their bare sides wired together.
Whatever the source, whatever the tree, we’ll fight it into the house, get it decorated, and finally settle down for a few minutes for a cup of coffee, if not a long winter’s nap.
I’ll be reminded of riding a mule in a rare pre-Christmas snowstorm; losing my brother’s prized knife; Mother’s battles with boxes of decorations, while Papa tried to figure out which lightbulb was keeping the string from working.
And I’ll remember how my folks always made sure we remembered the real reason for Christmas wasn’t the tree, the new fishing rod or basketball under it, or even Mother’s angel hanging in a place of honor.
They always made sure we remembered the day celebrates the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who was and is a gift to far surpass anything we could place under even the most perfect tree.
And you know, as long as we keep that in mind, I don’t think anybody will really care about whether there’s a bare patch near the trunk, or two red lights in a row, or more ornaments on the top than the bottom.
Merry Christmas, y’all.
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