OH TANNENBAUM!

 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.

Virginia, my wife, always spends Christmas with her family in Buenos Aires, a thousand miles from here—here being Northern Patagonia in the Andes Mountains. We never travel together. We have lots of pets and our place to take care of, and we never leave them alone. If I’m gone, she’s home. If she’s gone, I’m home. So I plan my visits back “home” to the US for other times of the year, which is okay by me, because I always rent a car and like to get around while I’m back Stateside and the weather in December in my native Ohio and surrounding states is usually a bitch at that time of the year. It’s not for nothing that the old saying about Ohio’s four seasons is that they include Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter and Construction. Or that the roads in Ohio are always better in winter because the snow fills in the potholes. Where I live now, at the other end of the world, June, July and August are a lot like that...and sometimes September...and sometimes October too.

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.

There was a time back in Buenos Aires before Virginia and I moved further south that we always had a Christmas celebration with her family and often with some of our friends as well. When I was first in Argentina, people didn’t put up trees and, in general, Santa Claus wasn’t “a thing”. More fittingly, since it was usually ninety in the shade in Buenos Aires at that time of the year, which is like late June in the States, kids got their gifts on January 6^th from the Three Wise Men, also known as the Magi, to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany. This is the Christian holiday that commemorates the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child in Bethlehem and the physical manifestation of God to the Gentiles. 

Instead of leaving out Christmas cookies for Santa, children left out grass or hay and water for the Wise Men’s camels and their shoes instead of stockings in which to receive gifts. Gaspar, Melchior and Balthazar—most kids had a favorite among the three and Balthazar seemed to be particularly popular. Christmas itself was more a time for people to get together and feast, drink and make merry and then to go out on their terraces and balconies to toast the birth of Jesus and each other, and watch the skies over the city light up with fireworks and high-floating paper lanterns. Of course, pets all over the city were terrified and the burn and eye hospitals did a swift trade resulting from injuries sustained in the inexpert use of firecrackers and Roman candles, and the ERs always got more than their usual share of gunshot wounds from people who’d forgotten to buy fireworks discharging pistols and rifles into the summer’s night sky over the crowded city while practically everyone was sitting out on the terrace having Christmas Eve dinner al fresco because it was too hot to all be cramped up inside the houses. But it all seemed like fun at the time.

Anyway, through the Global Village process of mass communications, and what Latin American leftists have always referred to as “cultural colonialism” and what Latin American right-wingers have always referred to as “the ‘foreignization’ of national culture”, Santa Claus started coming to town in Buenos Aires and other South American capitals, looking quite hot and sweaty in his Nordic garb, and people started doing what they saw in the Hollywood movies and dubbed TV series—putting up artificial trees, stringing lights (inside rather than out), buying and displaying ornaments and often doing the gift exchange thing on the evening of the twenty-fourth, depending on the family and their economic status. But the traditions of food, drink and fellowship remained intact and local in their tastes and the northern imports always felt a little strained and out of place, if fun too..

This year, due to the COVID pandemic, I won’t he “home alone” for Christmas. Virginia won’t be able to travel to see her brother and sister and nephews and cousins and friends in Buenos Aires. It’ll be nice to have her here and we’ll probably celebrate the way we celebrate every day, grateful for where we live in the forest and everything we have. But I can’t help but feel bad for her because her older sister is aging and very ill and under the constant attention of a live-in nurse and his two assistants and I’m sure that she wishes that she could be there rather than here.

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!