CHRISTMAS

What do you remember?

As a child, I mean. Was Christmas something special?

When I was in high school I auditioned for and was selected to sing in the Greenville Singing Christmas Tree. Chances are you've seen something reasonably similar. A tree shaped frame is built and the choir performs from it.

In the case of the GSCT the arena was the Greenville Memorial Auditorium - the largest venue in town at that time...the same place where just two years earlier I had paid to see Chicago and Three Dog Night and The Average White Band and The Marshall Tucker Band in concert (all separately...I was never so lucky as to have such mega-stars appear on one bill...)

But at Christmas it became our stage. The Singing Christmas Tree's stage. And for many performances.

It was a hometown tradition.

And the one song, of them all, the one Christmas song that was always performed, every year, by that huge, bigger than life, bigger than the biggest Baptist church Christmas tree, was a song entitled "Christmas Was Meant for Children".

You may have never heard this song. Outside of the stupendous Singing Christmas Tree I've only heard it a handful of places myself. But it is a lovely song.

Oh, we did the usuals...and we did them as well as they could be done. As I recall we drew heavily from The Many Moods of Christmas arrangements by Robert Shaw...certainly there were no better arrangements. No one ever made the Hallelujah Chorus more majestic, nor Little Town of Bethlehem more mysterious, nor Lullay Lullay more plaintiive.

But Christmas Was Meant for Children was, in the end, the signature piece. Perhaps it was the soaring fourteen word, 1st Tenor solo..."Let the star in the East that led us...shine on your tree tonight." If you heard the Singing Christmas Tree once, and returned the next year, the concert's end must necessarily stand in abeyance until this song was performed.

But these memories flow from my high school days. And that was well after Christmas was indelibly marked upon my heart in ways over which I had no control.

What do I recall about Christmas? I remember being a pre-schooler preparing for the annual visit to Sears to see Santa. I wanted to make a list. "But Tim, you don't know how to read." said my mother. And that was true...but I had anticipated that. "For my list" I said, "you can just draw a picture of each thing I want!"

I think I surprised Mom and Dad with my at-hand solution.

I recall my big brother getting a bicycle only a week or two after having his appendix removed. He sat upon his bike on Christmas day...but he could not ride.

I recall my father making construction paper stockings the Christmas before my younger brother was born in January. The stockings were marked with the following names: Dad, Mom, Frank, Tim, "?". We didn't know Scott would be Scott...these the days before ultra sound.

I remember as a toddler being transfixed...walking up and having a good look into the round, red, glass ball hanging from the tree. Amazed at how large my nose appeared in the fish-eye reflection...and how the entire room was wide open and wrapping around me.

But these rememberences are isolated, highlights. They don't define Christmas for me...they accent it.

That which defines Christmas for me is that which we did over and over again.

And it all started right about this time of year. It started the night we put up the Christmas tree.

I've read Victorian tales of mothers and fathers putting up the tree on Christmas eve after the children have gone to bed. I pitied those children...for they never got to help in the magical assembly of the most favorite icon.

In our house the tree went up three to four weeks before Christmas day.

It happened at night...always. And to mark the special Winter event we always, ALWAYS, had a fire in the fireplace and hot chocolate (made from real milk and liquid Hershey's...not some powdered shlock, thank you).

Now...in South Carolina you take your chances with the December weather. For it is nearly as likely to be 75 degrees on tree trimming night as it is to be 40 degrees.

Honest to God I remember at least one year we had every window on the ground floor open while the hot chocolate warmed and the fire crackled. And we laughed about it.

But we trimmed that tree. As we did the year before and all the years before that.

We were not...are not...sophisticates. As a child I do not remember a "real" tree ever being in the house. My parents told the story of the real tree purchased on a rainy evening...and upon the next morning finding the tree had shed every single needle on to the floor beneath it.

Perhaps it was that experience that prompted them into the world of artificial trees. I remember one or two years in the early sixties when we actually owned the silver aluminum tree replete with four-color-spotlight wheel. I suppose we were trendy.

I suppose.

But here is the dominant memory.

Every year the tree stood naked in the appropriate corner. Every year.

And every year we began with the placing of the lights. Every year.

Growing up it was Dad's job to place the lights. Mom's job to judge the lights. And the job of us kids to assist Dad in whatever way seemed/was/we dreamed appropriate.

I've got competing images in my brain...competing because of the repetition...repeating because I witnessed it again and again year in and year out. They compete...but they compete to tell the same story.

Dad would string the lights onto the tree. Mom would find a point in the room, usually the point furthest from the tree in an opposite corner. From there she would begin to point out to Dad where the "holes" were.

Light holes, if you will. Or black holes. Either seems to make the point in its own way.

And Dad would dutifully shift lights (these were the lights bigger than his thumb...we didn't have the tiny lights, so common today, back then) until they achieved a certain balance...a certain equal distribution across the face of the tree.

I remember this with clear detail...and perhaps I do so because it was this process that stood between us and the hanging of the ornaments (after the threading of the hooks, of course...its own uniquely 60's sort of activity).

At an early age I learned. The ornaments go on ONLY after the lights have been perfectly arrayed. And that perfect array could only be the result of a labored cooperative labor of love between Mom and Dad. And it was perhaps the earliest event with which I became acquainted in which Mom seemed to hold All The Cards.

Literally upon hands and knees, with back aching, Dad had to do Mom's bidding.

At least once per year.

And I think (based upon 40 year old memories) she just might have relished the role.

As mentioned above, - only then could we consider hanging the ornaments on the tree.

Only then could I (at seven years old) pull from the shoe box only recently removed from the attic the ornament of popsicle sticks, glue and glitter that I made just last year and , with boundless enthusiasm, dancing from foot to foot, seek permission to place it upon THE CHRISTMAS TREE (so tall and wondrous did this artificial sky-stretcher seem to me).

I'm, not certain I recall...but it seems to me there were such occasions in which my Mother said to me..."Here, honey, let's put that one around here toward the back where it won't get damaged."

I think I hung a lot of ornaments I made "toward the back" so they wouldn't get damaged. But memory may not serve.

Or... it might.

Anyway...such was our annual tree trimming. And upon completion we would turn out every light in the house to admire that inimitable glow from the tree. And that would be followed by the walk outside to the street to see how it would appear to our neighbors as they drove by.

And, remarkably...every year it was beautiful. Moreso than the last. Remarkable.

So this is what I remember.

And then - in comes my sister-in-law to make it all better.

I wrote recently of my trip with my brother's family into the mountains of North Carolina to cut a Christmas tree.

Trees look smaller in the open than they do in one's house.

It was huge. In the house it was HUGE.

And, in their house, the roles change a bit.

My sister-in-law Jan puts the lights on the tree. And my brother doesn't get to say a word.

Perhaps that is because it takes Jan a minimum of two days to put the lights on the tree. And that is because she puts between 4000 and 5000 lights on the tree.

You've probably never seen such a tree. It sparkles. I mean, she has to wear gloves to decorate the tree.

When you have 5000 lights on a tree you have a number of lights that begins to compete with the number of needles on the tree.

When Jan decorates a tree with lights - it sparkles.

All one has to do is to move one's head. Every light hides behind various needles. Or every light jumps our from behind the same. A 24,000 carat diamond. Or emerald. Such is the tree. It lives. It moves. It captivates.

And so I come to my point. I mean... I have a point to take you down Christmas Lane with me...did you doubt it?

My point is that as I flew from Germany to the USA and from the USA to Germany I read the "Sky Mall" catalogue in the seat pocket in front of me.

And it would seem that the biggest item to sell this year is the Christmas tree that is "pre decorated".

Pre-decorated??? Be it lights or balls or ribbons, or whatever...pre-decorated?

As if it is a bother...as if it is a labor...as if it is a burden?

NO! Paying taxes is a bother. Changing the oil is a labor. Looking after the neighbors kids after-school is a burden.

Decorating a Christmas tree is a MEMORY! That is what you've spent the last 10 minutes reading about.

In my mind it is a privilege. It is a communication. It is an act which I remember 40 years after the fact. It is a handing down from generation to generation.

To me these I-can't-be-bothered-with-Christmas Trees shortchange those who benefit from their so-called convenience.

It is something we do once per year. Just how lazy have we become?

I don't mean they don't have their place at all. I can understand, say, in the case of the frail for whom the alternative is no tree at all.

But not for families.

Not for children.

Shouldn't they be a part of placing every light...laughing as Dad, on his knees, has to adjust them.

Shouldn't they understand that some things are better made a compromise than are "perfect" straight out of the box.

How else will they ever realize that one sister-in-law with two day's time to spare is worth more than an entire Wal-Mart store with a thousand pre-lit Christmas trees.

They will remember.

I remember.

Christmas. Isn't it worth making the effort?