Don and I decorated our Christmas tree this morning. Our first Oregon Christmas, back in 2021, we purchased our first real tree in years. Growing up I never understood why anyone would ever buy a fake tree. Plus, I loved how a real pine tree made our house smell.
While our tree in my childhood living room was real, it was also flocked. But Mom let me have my own little green pine tree in my bedroom, where I hung strands of popcorn and added my own decorations.
When I was in high school, I remember being horrified when my then best friend, Karen Witcher, shared with me she had never had a real tree before. I somehow convinced her parents to let her buy a real tree that year, so the two of us went to downtown Lake Havasu City and I helped her buy her first non-artificial Christmas tree and together we decorated it. Years later, when she was an adult and a mother with a young child, she told me she never went back to an artificial tree.
As for me, I switched from a cut tree to an artificial tree in the 1980s a number of years after we moved to the mountain community of Wrightwood, California. While one would assume we would want a real tree being in the mountains, I switched after worrying about fires. Wrightwood is very dry, and we always had fires burning in the fireplace or woodstove. I worried about the safety of my family; plus artificial trees had improved since those tinsel trees of my youth.
Another plus with artificial trees, they are easier to decorate because you can manipulate their limbs. And I have a lot of tree ornaments. In fact, we only ended up using about a third of our tree ornaments this year.
I remember when I received my first Hallmark tree ornament. Don gave it to me for a birthday gift right before our first Christmas as a married couple. That was when I started collecting Christmas ornaments—primarily Hallmark, but not exclusively.
I mentioned we went back to a live tree after moving to Oregon. But what I didn’t tell you, I went back to an artificial tree the next Christmas, much to my son’s disapproval. Scott and SeAnne have a real tree. I’m glad for them, but for me, the artificial tree is easier to decorate—and I don’t have to rush to take it down because it dried out.
Now to the “tears” in the title in my blog post. Decorating the tree this morning involved a few tears. It’s not just because this is my first Christmas without Mom, but bringing out those ornaments stirred some sweet memories.
Those memories involved Scott and Elizabeth when we lived in Wrightwood. Each year when we would bring out the Christmas ornaments, they insisted on taking each one out of the box, inspecting and then playing with them before they went on the tree. I smile fondly at those old memories.
But it’s not just our kids growing up, but our parents moving on. I have no right to feel sad or melancholy, because I’ve spent 70 Christmases on this earth (at least in this lifetime) and most of them have been filled with family, friends, and love. While our parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles have moved on, they have left behind some wonderful Christmas memories for me to cherish, and because of that, I sometimes shed a few tears.
