Our parents had a significant impact on our personalities, almost as much as what we experienced in school or playing with friends in the neighborhood. How they managed our personal crises and traumas, as well as our challenges and accomplishments, and their responses to these typical life challenges made me who I am today. This short story personifies how our personalities changed due to their role modeling or lack thereof.
I have written and rewritten this story several times. My siblings also wrote their versions of what happened that day. This appeared to be a seminal event that impacted all of us.
Every fall – late in November or December – my parents would go away for about a week or two, usually to Indiana, Valparaiso and Columbia City, to visit Dad’s family, have some alone time, and, primarily, to shop for Christmas gifts for us kids.
They couldn’t shop with us while at home because we were too sharp – we would know they were buying Christmas gifts and what we were getting or tell our siblings what they were getting.
Nancy, our eldest sister, got the exciting job of watching this mob of unruly, rabble rousers while my parents were gone. If she was lucky, we were still in school, and her time in hell would be limited to evenings and weekends. On this occasion, it was cold and snowy outside – it must have been after Thanksgiving – and we harassed her and my nephew, Bryan, inside the house for hours on end.
Ralph, the second oldest, had a close relationship with Nancy. Although close in age, she was clearly the one in charge and Ralph deferred to her because he respected and loved her. Which was why it puzzles me that he was able to talk her into getting The Christmas Tree. Maybe it was the rationale of doing something nice for our parents – we will get the tree, trim it and it will be all ready when they returned – Voila, a done deal.
She could have innocently thought Ralph meant driving to the local nursery and choosing a cut, pruned, tied up tree we just needed to throw up on the roof of the car and drive a few blocks to get it home. Or maybe, just maybe, Nancy knew exactly how Ralph wanted to get the tree, and it was the zaniness in Nancy that is part of our family genetic makeup that made her agree.
We drove over an hour, out to the wilds of the Cook County Forest Preserve, where they allowed you to cut your own tree for just $5. When we got there, we faced deep snow, dropping temperatures, and limited tools: one axe, a loop of twine and a herd of smiling, eager kids. We were intrepid suburban Chicago kids and a little snow and cold would not stop us. We set out into the forest and looked for a tree we could cut down. Now, these forests had been preserved – hence, the name, forest preserve – for decades. They had trails that were easy to follow in the summer but hidden by the deep snow of a midwestern winter. We wandered around for quite a while, pointing at likely trees, making tracks in the snow, watching our breath freeze in the air, breathing in the clean snow and pine tree scent. Each tree we chose was big, bushy, beautiful really, in the winter landscape, with all the fellow trees standing tall and proud.
There was just one problem they all had in common – they were all 20 to 30 feet tall – most Christmas Tree Lot trees were six feet tall. We hadn’t brought a ladder to climb to the top of a tree to cut off the top and the rare, smaller ones were no taller than my brother’s knee. Finally, as we all stopped running around and started complaining about freezing, Ralph and Nancy found a tree to chop down. They did the chopping and when it was on the ground, we all grabbed handfuls of branches and dragged that poor thing out of the forest and towards the lot where the car was parked.
Our next task was to get the tree on the car and tie it down. The tree, outside the forest, looked a lot bigger than inside the forest but we were determined to take this thing home and inside a warm house. So, we tugged, and dragged, and pulled that tree up on the car. It obscured both the front and back windows of the Rambler station wagon, but we decided whoever was in the front seat could hold the branches away from the driver’s side window so Nancy could see as she drove. We also realized we did not have enough twine to tie the tree to the roof and so we opened all the windows of the car and stuck our hands out the windows and held onto the nearest tree branch we could grab. The ones in the back seat were hanging most of their upper bodies out the window to grab the nearest branch and Nancy drove, well under the speed limit, sticking her head out the window to see the road – our plan to hold the branches out of her line of sight did not work as well in implementation as it had in the planning phase.
I am certain I lost a mitten somewhere along the way home and almost lost a few fingers due to the freezing wind that whipped inside the car with all the open windows. Amazingly, none of the suburban police were interested in pulling over the green Rambler squashed by the huge spruce – it could be they couldn’t chase us due to the tears of laughter blinding their eyes.
We did get home without hitting anything or anything hitting us, and our next challenge was getting the tree inside. The pulling, pushing, dragging commenced and we yanked the tree inside the living room – only two doorways from the outside driveway – and it was then we realized we had serious gaps in our spatial skills.
The tree extended from one side of the 20-foot living room to the other. It squashed the two good chairs by the TV against the wall and held the living room door wide open. Thousands of pine needles and smaller branches littered the floor and sap stained the carpet. I could see Nancy on her tiptoes at one end of the tree and Ralph on the other, exchanging a look, a boy-are-we-in-trouble look. And this was before my parents, home early from their trip, tried to come through the front door and found they couldn’t because a 20-plus foot tree was in their living room.
To say that Dad was livid is to paint a picture of a recently relaxed man, rested from his vacation with his wife, who had probably gotten a whole week’s worth of sleep, suddenly confronted with his six kids and one grandson, freezing, exhausted and smiling over the huge tree taking up his living room. Dad didn’t say much at first – instead, he left briefly; while he was gone, Mom tried to collapse into one of the chairs but couldn’t reach them, so she turned around and went back to the car. When Dad returned, he had a handsaw. He started hacking and cutting and barbering that poor tree, while we all watched in horror; we started to cry when he cut it in half; we howled when he cut off the beautiful limbs, and we hid our eyes when he threw pieces of the tree out the front door. In the end, we had a Charlie Brown Tree – no taller than 3 or 4 feet – and we had to clean the living room rug, sweeping first to get the larger items out, then vacuuming for what seemed like hours to get all those little pine needles out of the carpet fibers.
We didn’t realize it then, but that became one of the best Christmas trees we ever had. That little tree we ended up with was too short for the cats to climb and knock over; it fit in the corner of the living room right between the TV and the hallway to the bedrooms so no getting stabbed with pine needles or electrocuted by the lights when brushing past it every time you went to bed like the other Christmas trees; the Christmas presents loomed over the little tree when Mom and Dad put them out on Christmas Eve so it made it look like we got more presents than ever. We got to love that little tree that we had brought home ourselves, one of the few altruistic, kids-only efforts I can remember from my childhood. We may not have done it well, but we did it our way – and no one ended up in the ER and nothing caught fire.