Once again Christmas is rolling around for the year. Christmas is my father’s favorite holiday. He loves the presents and the food, but the thing he gets most into with it is the Christmas tree. He’s not into decorating it though, he’s into going to pick out the Christmas tree.
Some families pick out a tree from a tree farm or lot all together. In my family my father goes to pick out the tree by himself. There was a brief period in time when the local Boy Scout troop would just set aside a tree for us, but for the most part my father has always been the one to pick the tree.
Every year the tree would either go one of three ways. It would fit perfectly, which was normal in the years the Boy Scouts set aside the tree. It would be way too big, taking up most of the room and occasionally having to be cropped to fit. Or it would be what my mother calls a Charlie Brown Tree.
A Charlie Brown Tree is when you bring home the smallest and most scraggly tree that you can find. The one that most people would never bring home, but you decided to bring home and try to decorate anyway. Because once you do it will look so much better. In reality it won’t but that’s what you tell yourself while buying it.
The house I grew up had a big living room with tall 9 foot ceiling. Which was perfect for my father’s overly zealous Christmas tree selection. The last Christmas we spent in that house was the year he went the most over the top with the tree. It was bigger than any tree he had brought home before. It was also way too big to fit in my parent’s tree stand.
Being too big for the tree, the tree, which at this point only had lights and some glass balls on it, of course fell over in the middle of the night. Glass and sap covered everything in the room and my mom spent the days leading up to Christmas trying to get it off of the floor. After that the tree stand was replaced with a bigger one to accommodate the overly zealous trees.
Which worked most years, except the first Christmas that my older sister came home with her husband. That year my dad brought home a Charlie Brown Tree. That he cut down himself. This tree not only had holes in it, but also was way too small for the tree stand. Causing it to fall down, thankfully undecorated, for the opposite reason of the overly zealous tree for a few years before.
That year the tree ended up being tied to the bannister in multiple places at its base and lashed into the stand. Then to keep the tree from leaning it had to be tried again higher up on its trunk, also to the bannister, with a piece of ribbon.
Since then the tree’s he’s come home with have been nice and reasonable. However, I’m sure there’s another overly zealous and Charlie Brown trees to come down the road.
