I haven’t had a Christmas tree in years...decades actually. Part of living far from your own family, and far from your adopted family, and of being a hermit by nature is that traditions kind of go out the window.
The last time I was home in Ohio for Christmas was 2005. It was not a
happy time. My younger brother had just died. The best gift I got was the
bottle of good whiskey my eldest nephew gave me. I finished it in under three
days in my hotel room while arranging to have a headstone done for the place
where my sister Darla and I scattered our brother’s ashes. But it was still
nice to spend the Christmas season with my sister and her family and with my
Aunt Marilyn and hers, as well as with all of the other cousins and friends
that had time to meet up with me and share a drink or a meal. And their
Christmas trees and gift exchanges and special Christmas meals and old
traditions reminded me of all the Christmases past from my childhood and youth.
As I say, it will be good to have her here, but I’ve never been miserable
like some people would be if they were left on their own at Christmas time. My
Christmases for the past twenty-odd years have always included work, projects,
writing and time in the woods. This year is no exception.
But they also include remembering Christmases Past. Not whole days,
perhaps, but sparkling flashes.
Christmas trees were a really big deal in our family back then. My
Grandpa Murel and Grandma Alice lived in a tiny house and since they always had
the whole Newland Clan over for Christmas Eve, they had to economize on space.
So my grandmother always had a tiny tree—more of a conifer shrub—that sat on a
table under the front window, surrounded by a sparkling fake snow sheet, on
which all the gifts were laid. Small though it might have been, however, the
little tree was always beautifully decorated with glass and metal ornaments, candy
canes, brightly colored lights and shiny silver foil “icicles”.
At Grandpa Vern and Grandma Myrt’s place, where the whole Weber family
gathered for Christmas lunch on Christmas Day, there was always a very
full-size tannenbaum loaded with
ornaments, many of which held special significance for my grandmother—some that
she’d inherited that were very old, some that we grandkids had made for her
growing up, some that her four children had given her over the years and still
others that had graced her Christmas trees for decades, from back in the days
when her family had been growing up on tenant farms and her now grown kids had
been little and helped her string beads and popcorn to flesh out the
decorations. It had to be a special kind of tree. Vern insisted. He said he
chose the species to make sure it “wasn’t one of those that’ll be nettling the
hell out of me while I’m settin’ it up.” So no Scotch pines or Douglas firs for
him. He always looked for a nice long-needled spruce or white pine. And he knew
where to find them, and just about every other kind of tree, since he was the
superintendent of the local cemetery and did all the landscaping himself. They
were always full, perfectly conical and quite tall, topped by an antique angel
whose story I never knew.
Whitie always claimed he “liked a real tree”, and was disdainful toward
people who spent a fortune on expensive, flashy artificial trees. But knowing
Whitie, who was about as careful with a dollar as anybody could get, I figure
it was more about economy than aesthetics. Reba Mae, however, also always
favored a natural tree while we kids were small and it wasn’t until we grew up
and moved out that she ignored Whitie’s whining about the expense and bought
herself a fake, but quite lovely tree.
If Whitie really “liked a real tree”, however, it was hard to tell it
from his attitude about buying them and setting them up. The whole Christmas
tree routine seemed to trigger the worst elements of his obsessive-compulsive
personality. If Reba Mae bought the tree it was never up to his standards—the “damn
thing” was crooked, flat on one side, full of brown needles, too short, too
tall, not full enough or just plain ugly. So she started making him go along to
pick them out. And that was enough to drive a person crazy because he was
perfectly capable of going to wherever the Christmas tree place was on a given
year and one by one go through every single tree to ensure that he was getting
the most tree for his money. But even then, when he got it home, he would
suddenly find that this one was also too tall, too short, too flat, too thin,
off-center or whatever.
I recall vividly a year when Reba Mae’d had enough and said she thought
it would be “a kind of nice sort of father and son thing” for Whitie and me to
go pick out the tree together. I must have been nine or ten at the time and Whitie
really didn’t have much use for me since our personalities couldn’t have been
more different. So it was a time when my mother was always trying to find ways
to push us closer together. But I suspect that, in this case it was because she
just couldn’t face another year of Christmas-tree shopping with Whitie and
found a guilt-free way of getting me to stand in.
She sprang this on my father during supper as soon as he got home from
work and he grumbled that he didn’t really feel like “getting into the goddamn
car again and going back uptown.” So
Reba Mae suggested maybe we could “drive over to the fairgrounds and buy one
from the Boy Scouts.”
“The Boy Scouts!” Whitie
cried, as if my mother had suggested buying a tree from a terrorist organization.
“They’re always higher than hell!”
So Dad and I climbed into his ’52 Chevy and drove uptown to the grocery
store of his friend and fellow local merchant Elwood Chesbrough. It was a nice
grocery store on the far east end of the main drag over the B&O Railroad
tracks. This year Mr. Chesbrough had a truckload of pines leaning against the
building outside. Winter days are short in Ohio and it was already dark out, but
Mr. Chesbrough had the outside lights on and there was a streetlamp that
illuminated the side of the building. “See there, Danny,” Whitie said. “Boy
Scouts my ass, Elwood’s got some real nice trees here.”
We went in and Whitie and Elwood shot the breeze for almost half an
hour, before Mr. Chesbrough finally said, “So what can I do ya for, Whitie?”
and my father told him we wanted a Christmas tree. “Take your pick!” he said.
And out we went.
It was bitter cold out, and now there were snow flurries in the air. I
right away looked at the first tree in line and said, “This is a nice one!” To
which Whitie said, “Nice? Damn thing looks like it died of blight.”
“How ‘bout this one?” I said, grabbing a needly bough and giving it a
squeeze. But Whitie was ignoring me since my first choice had demonstrated me
to be lacking in Christmas tree criteria. So for the next forty minutes or so,
I mostly looked up at the streetlamp to watch the flurries drift down and jigged
around to try and keep from freezing while Whitie meticulously went through
every tree against the wall, standing each up and inspecting it from all sides,
then discarding it before moving on to the next one until he’d been through
them all and then going back to some that he’d discarded before. Eventually,
Mr. Chesbrough came out and said, “So’d ya find one?”
“Hell, Elwood, I dunno. How’s this one?”
“Why don’t we ask the expert?” Mr. Chesbrough said.
“Huh?”
“Your boy.”
“Danny?”
The grocery store owner looked at him like, “Hell, I don’t know. Is that
his name?”
“It’s really pretty, Dad!” I said making myself sound enthused so we
could get out of there before frostbite set in.
“What do you think, Elwood?”
“I’m with the boy, Whitie. Best tree out here.”
So after a bit of wrangling over the price, Whitie finally shelled out
and we were off for home with our beautiful pine.
Of course, when he and my mother got it screwed into the tree-stand...it
was too tall, flat on one side, sitting skewed, etc., etc., etc...
But one of the Ohio Christmases I remember best was the year I turned
eighteen and my sister Darla was home for Christmas break from college and she
and I did our Christmas shopping together. Once we’d finished, we went together
to what was a great bar back then in our small Ohio town of Wapakoneta, a watering-hole
called Meinerding’s. The place with the wonderful name was only open for twelve
years but in that time it and its owner, Ralph Meinerding, developed an almost
legendary reputation. In a town where the bars tended to be male, Ralph’s place
attracted the middle-aged to younger set of both sexes and combined cheap draft
with delicious bar food.
Ralph himself was a small, gentle guy who usually had the stub of a
cigar chomped in his jaw. A good family man who was known to like gardening,
wood-working, making intricate doll-houses and a good game of euchre or
sheephead if he could find one, Ralph was always kind and friendly. But he kept
a bruiser of a Viking-looking heavyweight called Sam Fullenkamp on hand as his
bartender and part-time (whenever needed) bouncer and if Meinerding’s was a
nice, friendly, fun kind of a bar, Sam made sure it stayed that way.
Although his gargantuan deep-fried pork tenderloin sandwiches were the cuisine de rigueur that Ralph was best
known for, he had the art of deep-frying just about anything down pat. In a
facetious piece a long time ago, I once joked that “Ralph was the king of fry...Ralph
fried mushrooms and fried onions and fried beefsteak potatoes and just about
anything else you could fry. Hell, if a fight broke out and the bouncer, Sam
Fullencamp, knocked somebody's ear off the side of their head, you had to get
it off the counter quick before Ralph breaded it an tossed it into the fryer.” But the truth is, you would have had to go a
long way to find bar food as good as Meinerding’s.
So anyway, although I had misspent huge blocks of my junior high and high school days in a billiard and card saloon called The Brunswick, which was also a famous Wapakoneta institution, that Christmas shopping evening with my sister was the first time I’d ever set foot in Meinerding’s—though my sister and her friends knew it well. That’s one of the Christmases I remember best from my adolescence, because sitting there with my sister, no longer Big Sis and Little Brother, but two almost adult friends, enjoying a draft beer and a bite together a few days before Christmas, there was a kind of realization that this was the first night of the rest of my life and that there lay a youthful future before me to do with what I might. And because that awareness was so powerful, I still have the warm, friendly fragrance of that barroom in my head. I can still taste the ice cold beer with its slightly bitter froth, a taste I’ve tried to recreate in every one of the thousands of beers I’ve guzzled since, but to no avail. Because it wasn’t the flavor of the beer but the flavor of life that I was drinking in. It was a moment of almost perfect happiness.
And so, although I may no longer decorate a Christmas tree, my head and
heart are yet still full of the light and joy of the Christmas season, because
it’s a time of year that also helps me take stock and realize just how good
life has been to me, if for no other reason because I discovered early on that
light and joy are precisely what not only Christmas, but also life itself, are
all about.
May the Christmas and New Year season bring all of you a sense of joy
and gratitude as well, and may this be the first day of one of the best times
in your life.
Merry Christmas and happy New Year to you all!
