First Christmas Tree Memories

My family had always had real Christmas trees, not artificial. As a child I wanted an artificial one because of the fact that we never had one. My parents would go out in the car and come back with a tree tied to the top of the car. We didn’t even get to go when it was picked out.

When I got married, we always got real ones too. By that time, I didn’t want an artificial one. Just the very word “artificial” turned me off. I remember the tree we got the first year we were married. We didn’t have money. We had married in September and I had lost my job in November. My husband wasn’t working. He was studying for the Bar Exam. My sister-in-law offered us a small artificial tree she had used when she had a one room apartment but we really didn’t want to take it. We were both waiting to see if we could manage to get a real tree. My husband got a small job working for his brother-in-law’s law firm. I think he just had to help one client fill out paperwork for an immigration hearing. He was paid by the hour and it wasn’t a lot of hours but it saved us that first Christmas. About a week before Christmas, we were able to go get a tree. It was a small tree but it didn’t matter. We put it next to the front door, on top of an end table and it was still shorter than me. I’m short (5 feet, barely). My mother had given me a box of Christmas decorations. In the box was a package of that angel hair stuff to cover trees and a string of lights. I went to K-Mart and got a package of wooden cut outs in Christmas shapes that also came with paints and a paint brush. I think I paid about $3 for it (1978 dollars). I took the box home and carefully popped the ornaments out of the sheet. They had to be sanded down to get rid of the rough edges. Then I got to paint them and after they dried, I sprinkled glitter on some of them and glued rhinestones on a few select spots. In the end, I had enough ornaments for our little tree. We strung the lights on the tree, put on the ornaments I had made, along with an “our first Christmas together” ornament someone had given us. I remember going to Pic N Save (now Big Lots) and getting a tree topper. It was a white spiky thing with the nativity painted on it. It was very plain but it was cheap and I liked it for out little tree. When I took it home, I glued a very thin line of glitter along the sides of the spiky thing and then it had just the right amount of sparkle to it. We finished off the tree with the angel hair and because it was such a small tree, one package of angel hair was perfect. It covered it so well and it gave the colored lights a glowing quality; the light kind of radiating throughout the tree.

I rarely think of that tree. In fact, this post started out to be about another Christmas tree but something made me write this. I don’t know why but I guess I won’t fight it. Somewhere there is a picture of that first little tree my now ex-husband and I created out of almost nothing and every year, when I pull out our Christmas ornaments, I find a few of the little wooden ornaments that I painted thirty years ago. Although we have much nicer ornaments now, the ones from that first Christmas still hold a special place in my memories.