Daddy would bring it home. Then Grampa would help him build a wooden stand for it, with an anxious audience gathered around. Next it would be placed in front of the living room window, to 'warm up'. Momma would bring a white sheet and we would wrap it all the way around the stand, and wait for an hour or so before we could decorate it...
That was sometimes a very long wait, so Mom would have us help make cookies while...Daddy would get down the well worn decoration box from the top of the closet, soon we kids would go through it with excited reverence.
You'd think we had never seen the stuff before. Among the treasures were Gramma's old tiny glass ornament's that hung on Daddy's tree when he was a little boy...colored light's and silver tinsel...but my most favorite part was the 'ice cycles'!
After Daddy would wrap the light's onto the tree, Mom would drape the tinsel on it how she wanted it, then she would help point out where an ornament needed to go, as the older kid's would decorate the top part of the tree, the little kid's the bottom part with the ornament's...
Then she would pull out the long thin boxes that held the tiny little strips, of something that honestly looked like cut tinfoil to me, but a lot softer...
Someone would hang it evenly over my left arm so I could drape it over the tree branch with my right hand...It was long, or I was short, because it almost touched the floor on both ends.
And we would drape it gently, one strand at a time...That is if we were the kind of kids that hung thing's one at a time from a branch. But we weren't. We were the kind of kid's that would stand back from the tree, take one strand, and huck it at the tree.
Not hard. But toss it up in the air, in the general direction of the tree, so it would 'fall like snow', not looking like we had measured how to put it on the tree.
There were a lot of strands in those boxes. And I'm the youngest, the one with the least amount of patience...so my arm would get tired sticking up there...and pretty soon I'd be tossing up a couple strands at a time.
Not much longer and I would be grabbing a hand full and tossing it a little more directly at the tree.
Ok it would be a congealed clump, launched with the velocity of a short missle projectile from my grubby little mitt.
In spit of me the tree always looked pretty darn good, and someone always unclumped the ice cycle wad's that I thought had melted into the right places...
At night when it got dark, we would turn off all the lights, turn on the tree light's and sprawl out on the floor, next to, but not directly under the tree, and watch the light's dancing on the ceiling, telling Christmas stories, or how we were going to stay up this year to see Santa...
Us three younger kids, would sit on the back of the old horse hair chair, looking out the window's of the front door, to see the aluminum tree with the light that rotated to make the tree change color's, over at the King's house...
We like that tree, but we loved ours...
May you remember happy Christmas memories, and may God bless!
(c)
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