For as long as I can remember, my parents would always have a live Christmas tree. My Dad would go out into the forest and bring some sad, scraggly specimen back and then with his magical, crafty, super powers (and cordless drill), would proceed to fill the sparse areas of the tree with extra branches relocated from other areas of the trunk. This may seem like an inspired hack but when it came to Dad, his ‘tool box’ was less about the endless acres of hardware hanging on the garage wall and more to do with his ability to tap into the incredibly creative grey matter between his ears.
Winter was a particularly good time to benefit from his mechanically inclined ‘gifts’. Several years he flooded the back yard and made us and the neighbourhood kids a proper ice rink. We had the best snow forts due to the plywood form he made for packing perfect ‘bricks’, one time he refurbished an old snowmobile and in a cunning attempt to encourage one of his kids to help shovel the driveway, attached an old steel blade to the ride-on mower and transformed it into a snow plow. (it worked once, we didn’t clear the way clean enough for my Mom)
On sub-zero nights, rather than clear a path to dig out the snow covered BBQ, we would cook hamburgers inside the house on a grill he found that fit perfectly inside our fireplace and there was a Christmas he convinced the Kmart store manager to give him the broken remains of two Tyco Night Glow car sets in order to build one super colossal track for us to race the tiny and fully restored radio controlled sportscars.
But back to my tree story. Despite our tradition (and apparently preference) for a naturally lopsided twig in a pot, one holiday after Dad was called out for a desperate last minute job at the local Farmer’s market, the grateful owner threw in a ‘tree’ as compensation for the late hour. Dad brought the bundle home and imagine all our shocked faces when we untied the branches and let the picture perfect specimen elegantly unfold into shape. We had never experienced a farmed tree let alone a bought tree and were suitably impressed by its symmetry – until we discovered the tightly packed branches made decorating difficult and the ornaments didn’t hang quite so well … cue Dad, this time he took his nippers and removed branches; reverse engineering the quintessential shape back into his version of our reliably cooperative Charlie Brown tree.
Of course then we had to wait until Dad untangled, checked and replaced any broken bulbs on the strings of Christmas lights because they “have to go on first!” but I will save that story for another day.
My wish to you this festive season, may all your trees be missing just the right amount of branches!
Fröhliche Weihnachten everyone!