Christmas Tree Memories

A couple of weeks ago we made the annual trip to the garden centre to pick our Christmas tree.

I had measured the height, floor to ceiling, in our lounge to ensure that the fir that we bought was sufficiently large.  I remember from when I was little how critical that factor is. Shallow I know...but I'm thinking back to when I was 7 or so. And I remember being disappointed on more than one occasion.

All of the trees in our local garden centre are pre-netted and so there's no way of knowing which are shapely specimens and which not.  So I use my tried and tested tree-hugging technique... How far can I get my arms round?  And then the "how heavy is it?" follow-up test, on the basis that the heavier it is the more voluminous it ought to be when de-netted at home.

And I'm pleased to say that this year's centrepiece is a good one... cue massive relief because it's always a bit of a lottery when they-re all pre-netted and I'd hate to be the source of disappointment.

But really in some ways the tree is too nice... it lacks the intensity of the tree smell that I remember (it seems a lot more subtle now) and many of the rough edges that supply so many of the memories from our childhood Christmas trees.

For instance...

It's that type of tree that hardly drops any needles.  I don't think they existed when I was little... we always had one of those "almost bald by Christmas day" versions.  To try to minimise the shedding we'd leave the tree out overnight in a bucket of water once we'd got it home from the local farm (where they used to grow the things... it was imaginatively named "Christmas Tree Farm"... I wonder how long it took them to come up with that!).

If that "outside overnight" trick made any difference then I dread to think what it would have looked like on Christmas Day without doing that... because even with this technique the needles would pitter patter like raindrops with the slightest brush of a branch.

Some people swore that hair spray was the answer...

Not sure if that worked.

And the trees back then were very rarely the classic triangular shape... the branches frequently looked like they had grown in a direction of their own choosing... making the whole thing look more like Medusa's hairstyle instead of the perfect examples that adorned the Christmas cards that hung from a string over the fireplace on those mini Christmas card clothes pegs.

"It'll look fine when the lights and the tinsel and the baubles are on it" was the annual statement... and to be fair it always ended up looking brilliant when I was a nipper.

Our tree was usually too small to put on the floor... that would have looked daft.  

So we always put it on a small wooden chair taken from my bedroom.  The chair would be enveloped in wrapping paper to make it look more Christmassy and to hide the fact, pretty unsuccessfully, that it was a chair.

The tree didn't go in one of the convenient tripoddy stands that you get these days... it always went into a bucket of sand (which would also receive the wrapping paper treatment).

Unfortunately the sand, especially when water was added (to try to stem the needle dropping), didn't hold the tree rigidly and so there were years where, over time, the tree would develop a slight and ever-increasingly precarious lean which was nigh on impossible to rectify...

Time for the lights... and another "rough edges" ritual that progress has sanitised out of our lives.  

Before putting the lights on the tree we'd plug them in to check that all was well.  

Whereas nowadays if one bulb (or LEDS as they all are now) fails it isn't the end of the World, back then it was like that 70s comedy programme "The Rag Trade" (remember that?  With Peter Jones, Miriam Carlin and the women with thick glasses off "On The Buses" - it was set in a sewing factory and was all about the tensions between the workers and the management... and invariably involved the workers going on strike) where it was a case of "one out, all out" i.e. if one bulb failed then none of them would light and you wouldn't know which one was to blame. 


Image source: http://sitcoms.frey-united.com/serial/sitcom/the-rag-trade/425/review

On the plus side back then the lights would either be on or off. You didn't get a myriad of options for them flashing or pulsing or anything like that.  (I'm especially grumpy about that currently because one of the sets of lights that we put on our tree this year is jammed in the worst sequenced rapid flashing mode and there's nothing that we can do about it apart from unplug the things... why can't they just keep things simple?)

Cue checking each bulb to see if it was just loose... it wasn't.

OK... now hunt for the spare bulbs in the Christmas decorations box... and then try replacing each bulb, one at a time, to see which one was the culprit.

Who needed Netflix when there were so many time-devouring jobs to do back then.?

Finally... found the one that wasn't working.  Have a look to confirm and yes, the filament was clearly burnt out.

And now the tree decoration could commence in earnest...

And before long our somewhat spindly (the trees on every single TV programme were Arnold Schwarzeneggar, ours was Mr Bean) needle dropper was transformed into OUR Christmas Tree... 

We loved it... it was so exciting... and it meant that Christmas really was just around the corner.

And I got to do something that I avoided doing the whole year.

It was MY JOB.

And it's not the same now because our tree is too nice...

It only works with a proper "needle dropper"...

Where, as time passes, the carpet under the tree gets covered by a snow-like layer of pine needles...

Nice and thick...

They need hoovering...

MY JOB.

Wheel out the hoover...

Which was an upright... 

Not the type of upright that my Grandma had...

She had a old-fashioned Hoover brand hoover with a light on the front...

Presumably in case you ever experienced the urge to go round hoovering at midnight with all the lights off...

Highly unlikely but the boffins in Hoover R&D clearly thought "better safe than sorry"!

And it had a zip-up dust bag... which would inflate like a set of bagpipes when the machine with its deafing drone was switched on and sometimes you'd get a puff of dust through the pores of the bag too...

A hint that the bag needed emptying...

Especially if accompanied by that "I'm stuffed" stink that we still get today from our Henry.

Our hoover was an Electrolux in a tasteful shade of cream.

And it was such a satisfying experience to power it up and plough it through the carpet of pine needles... leaving a swathe of clean carpet in between the green.

Well nearly clean... there'd always be the odd stray needle that refused to surrender and had entrapped itself in the carpet fibres...

The only option was to do what everyone does in that situation...

It's just impossible to resist...

Pluck said needle out of the carpet...

And then put it back onto the carpet, just in front of the hoover...

And vacuum it up!

There must be some unwritten rule somewhere that says "thou shallt never pick up something the hoover hath missed and cast it unto the bin, thou must placeth it back from whence it came and hoover it up again... no matter how many attempts it taketh".

To do anything else would represent utter failure.

Bizarre.

But no matter how thoroughly we hoovered the tree would always have the last word... and usually the following June or July.

We'd be walking round bare-footed in the lounge...

And, without any warning whatsoever, one of us would be stabbed... 

By a rogue pine needle which had sneakily secreted itself in the depths of the carpet pile...

And had fiercely resisted the umpteen times the hoover must have passed overhead...

So that it could exact its revenge on us... having dried out and sharpened itself over the previous 6 months.

Our childhood Christmas tree... the gift that kept on giving...

And in my head it still does....


PPS while I was doing some research for this email I came across this... I'm speechless...



That isn't a joke... you can buy them at Walmart.com.