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December, 2007 |
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O Tannenbaum |
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I was driving home from work during Thanksgiving week, through the rural area where I now teach Art at a small country school on Edisto Island. It is a 40 mile drive through an extraordinary landscape of salt marsh and pine forest. From school to home I pass through only three traffic lights, so that will give you some idea how far removed I am from the hustle and bustle of the usual commuter traffic in the Lowcountry. |
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But because of the upcoming holiday I had detoured from my usual route to pick up a few last-minute purchases for our Thanksgiving feast. And that’s when I saw them, lined up in rows in the midst of a cordoned-off corner and protected from the beating sun by a canvas canopy. Christmas trees. I shook my head to clear my vision. It was 78 degrees outside and I had the AC running inside, and yes, it really was still before Thanksgiving. But there they were, standing tall and green and redolent of fresh-cut fragrance. I lowered my window to catch a whiff, the promise of Christmas filling the sultry air. |
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| I do not remember the holiday starting so early, certainly not when we were kids, but it catches me off guard every year when I forget how traditions are different here in the south, where the seasons are not so easily marked by weather and temperature. | ||
| Now don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas trees. But in my family the tree did not usher in the holiday until Christmas Eve. | ||
| From all that I have read about fir trees as a focal point of the Christian holiday, and even in pre-Christian times, the various versions of its origins seem to work their way back to Germany and to early Germanic tribes. And as the tradition spread to other countries, it seems also to be through Germanic connections. Queen Victoria’s annual celebrated Christmas tree began when she married her German cousin, Prince Albert. Hessian soldiers decorated fir trees during the American Revolution, and German settlers erected a Christmas tree in Pennsylvania in the 1800s. | ||
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| My mother’s family was from Germany, where they followed the custom of “putting up the tree” on Christmas Eve and taking it down on Epiphany, and that is what my mother did, when we were kids. Of course by late December the idea of finding the perfect tree was narrowly limited, as most of the best specimens had already been claimed by other families. But my mother did not care about symmetry and fullness. She felt that the lesser of the pickings would anyway be garnished by the beauty of the lights and the ornaments. | ||
| The modern custom of decorating a tree dates back to the 16th century when many of the early trees were festooned with edibles, such as apples, pretzels, and even cheese. My mother told the story of a family tree when she was young that was decorated with gingerbread men that her mother had baked especially for the tree. | ||
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| My mother, probably around age ten, longed for just one bite of the tasty forbidden treat, and found she could not restrain herself to just one bite. She secretly bit the feet and legs off many of the cookies on the tree, but not without the premeditated scheme of maiming only those gingerbread men that were within reach of her youngest brother, Frank. So when their mother discovered the cookie transgression, she lined all the kids up by the tree, and poor little Frank took the rap for the cookie caper. Or almost did, for as the children were released from the line-up, their mother noticed some telltale crumbs still sticking to my mother’s chin. | ||
| When we lived in rural Maine, our Christmas tree came fresh from the woods around us. Cati was young then, just a toddler, but still remembers us pulling her on the toboggan in search of the perfect tree. One year we found an abandoned bird’s nest in our chosen tree, and kept it there as a special decoration, adding a delicate glass bird to its cozy resting place. | ||
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| When we first moved to the Lowcountry we had not yet become attuned to the earliness of Christmas-tree shopping and left our quest to the last moment. We were stunned to discover that all the tree lots were empty or shut down. One last try was to Lowe’s Home Center. I waited in the car while Cati ran inside to inquire, only to be told that the last of the trees had been thrown into the dumpster. | ||
| Well, you can imagine my surprise when I spotted my child climbing into the dumpster to inspect the castoffs, and my even greater surprise when she emerged with a suitable tree! That is, half a tree, as only one side was still decked with needles that were green, the rest were brown and dried. But we optimistically took it home, arranged it in a corner with its “good” side out, and happily decorated it with lights and ornaments. In memory now, it still remains as one of our prettiest trees; perhaps because of the fun we had in restoring it to active duty as a Christmas delight. | ||
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| Last year, when we bought our new house just before the holidays, we splurged on our biggest tree ever, to fill the high space beneath a cathedral ceiling. It was ten feet tall, lush and lovely, and we adorned it with the full array of our extensive ornament collection. It was, in fact, the first time that I was able to hang all 25 of the silver bells that my brother Jack had given my mother over the years of his adulthood. | ||
| The finished tree filled me with an overwhelming sense of peace, for our loving family gathered here, for the comfort and beauty of our new home, and for the joyous spirit of the holiday. I remember sighing with complete happiness and contentment. | ||
| And then that night, late into the night, a strange noise awakened me. It was something like a whoosh or a thump, but I wasn’t sure, as the sounds of the new house were still unknown to me. Imagine my surprise when we got up the next morning and found that our beautiful ten-foot fully-decorated in all its splendor tree had keeled over in the night, over-laden in front by the silver bells, and lay fallen in the midst of broken glass ornaments and tinsel debris. I cried and I laughed, for surely this was the funniest Christmas tree tale of all, the night the tree fell over. | ||
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| As I sat in traffic at the corner by that Christmas tree lot the week before Thanksgiving, a song from grade school drifted back into my mind and memory. It was the one that Miss Undritz had us learn in English and in German, the song of the Christmas tree, O Tannenbaum. | ||
| The song, like the tradition of the tree, is from Germany, and it, too, is of various origins and is set to several different melodies. Here is the verse I remember most from 8th grade, and which, to me, embodies the joys of putting up the Christmas tree, whatever its size, shape, or condition, and celebrating with family and friends the many blessings of the holiday season. | ||
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O Tannenbaum, o
Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum, Wie grün sind deine Blätter! |
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Du grünst nicht nur zur Sommerzeit, |
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O Christmas Tree O, Christmas Tree, |
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They're green when summer days are bright; |
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