T. GAMBLE: Perfect memories of imperfect Christmas trees

Christmas. What can anyone say about Christmas that hasn’t already been said? We’ve already had “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” to express Christmas sentiment on film.

We’ve got “White Christmas” and “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” and, the plague on all society, “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” on the musical side.

We put up decorations right after Halloween now and start Christmas sales in September. I tell you if things keep on the way they have headed the last 40 years, before long we will close all businesses on Dec. 1 and have a giant online mega-sale the rest of December.

There was a time, however, when it wasn’t quite so frantic. A time when it meant more than gift-buying and taking two weeks off from work.

Yes, there was a time when you did not pay $90 for a tree that sheds all it needles on the floor and the cat climbs like it is a giant scratching post. A simpler time when the family gathered together, road out to a farm to cut a live tree from the woods, and then trespassed onto neighbor Johnnie’s woods when they noticed a better looking cedar tree growing over there.

For many years, our family loaded up and searched the woods for the perfect tree. Or Johnnie’s, whatever the case may be.

We always found a perfect specimen deep in the woods. We’d then drag it across the forest floor and take it to the house, where the perfect tree would transform.

All of the sudden, it looked like the only surviving tree from a World War II bombed-out woods. It had a large hole here, a crooked trunk there. A dead spot here, a broken limb there. People today just do not understand the joy of turning a tree round and round, trying to find the one spot that hid all the imperfections so the front part looked like a decent tree.

From time to time we’d just give up and have to go back and get another one.

The problem is — or at least was — that cedar trees are very sneaky little trees. Out in the wild blue yonder, they look regal and full, almost majestic. They call out to you. “Get me, yes me,” they say.

They convince you that a 12-foot-tall tree will fit in a room with 8-foot ceilings. You’ve really never experienced Christmas until you have cut off the top four feet of a Christmas tree to make it fit the aforementioned 8-foot room.

Everyone loves a rotund beer barrel shaped Christmas tree.

We also use to cover the trees with tinsel or icicles, whatever you want to call them. We would have covered them in nice beautiful ornaments, except we didn’t have any and the limbs were too weak to hold anything but the tinsel anyway. Lights were big giant multicolored things that would set a tree on fire in about 32 minutes.

You just haven’t fully enjoyed Christmas until you’ve burned down a house or two.

We always took a picture of the fully decorated tree and declared that this one might be the prettiest tree yet, until, of course, next year, when we started it all over again.

Funny thing, even now, looking back at all those old Polaroid photographs, the trees really weren’t too symmetrical and the decorations might be lopsided, but they’re still prettier than any perfect 10-foot store-bought tree I see today.

’ Cause, you see, it’s not the tree that needs to be perfect, but rather the memory. As Christmas approaches, I hope your Christmas becomes a perfect memory.

Contact columnist T. Gamble at [email protected].