On The First Day Of Christmas, My True Love Gave To Me....

.....A Charlie Brown 'In-The-Stand' Tree

Last Monday, that day of super wild wind, lashing rain, and traffic lights out all over the place, I finally made it across town, the seemingly endless array of (no)four-way-stops notwithstanding.

Almost immediately my two daughters, Bigger E. and littler e., and me headed out to our local Lion's Club treelot at 41st and Fraser.

When we got there the old guys running the place were soaking wet but still as jolly as ever as they helped us choose our own special ball of needles.

And the choosing took awhile because at first E. wanted a behemoth that couldn't possibly fit in the house while e. was momentarily smitten by one of those cultivated treebots with branches denser than lead and a trunk the diameter of a dinner plate.

Then, suddenly, they settled on a stubby six footer that would be, as e. said, 'just perfect because it would be easy for Mom to put the angel on top.' E. agreed, but also mentioned that she liked the way the 'branches were sort-of crooked at the bottom'.

E. is now a teenager who likes the Ramones and creative dishevelment.

I was skeptical in the extreme, but the girls persevered, and so in the end we lugged Stubby over to the rickety sawhorses where the the old guys argued about how much to saw off the bottom while we slapped down our $23.00.

Which was probably at least four, maybe even five, bucks more than we would have spent if we'd gone to IKEA instead.

But if we'd done that E. and e. wouldn't have received candy canes and a cheering section when they carried the tree out of the lot to the VW (not so)Microbus.

****

When I was a kid, my Dad worked on boats that towed logs up and down the Westcoast.

And because the big lumber companies were always in a frenzy in December trying to get as much wood out of the bush as they could before winter set in, Dad was often at sea until right before Christmas.

Which meant that my two brothers and I often had to wait..... and wait......and wait......and then wait again before we could finally get our tree.

But the wait was almost always worth it.

And never more so than in 1968, when I was nine.

If I'm not mistaken we walked to the lot tucked in behind the old Oak Bay Theatre on December 23rd that year.

It was so late in the season that there were hardly any trees left to choose from that night.

Which didn't really matter because, for some explicable reason, Dad let us choose the largest one they had.

And we, my brothers and I, carried it all the way home ourselves, for the first time I think, because my youngest brother was only five that year.

Anyway, what really made that walk great and memorable was the fact that it started to snow about half-way home.

And it didn't stop all night long.

And it didn't melt the entire Christmas holidays.

And even better, it was actually cold enough for our Dad to lay down huge sheets of summer camping plastic in the back yard that he flooded with water to make us a skating rink.

So, while Apollo 8 circled the moon I alternated between pretending my bedroom closet was a Command Module and pretending I could skate.

After all, this was Victoria, a place where prolonged cold snaps were very rare indeed.

****

The stubby little tree that E. and e. picked out this year did not go up on Monday night because we had to rush off to littler e.'s Tapdance show at the Scottish Cultural center down in Marpole, which is a story and-a-half in and of itself.

Then on Tuesday I couldn't find our rickety old tree stand stand with the leaky bucket and Bigger E. had to go to Musical Theatre in Richmond that night.

As a result, when I finally got home late, as usual, on Wednesday I was prepared for a brutal heckfire and brimstone evening involving a trek to Canadian Tire to fight the crowds followed by an hour-long struggle trying to put up the tree in a straight and non-tilted fashion with a minimum of protrusion from the crooked branches at the bottom.

So imagine my surprise when I walked in the door and found that little e. and her mom C. had rushed home from 'Meet-The-Teacher' day to put up the trees all by themselves.

I was so relieved and so happy that I actually momentarily lost my head and agreed to do a job that I hate even more - putting up the lights.

After much untangling, cursing under my breath, and coerced rearranging, I finally got the bloody things up without electrocuting myself and even managed to connect them all to one cord with a foot switch, which made C. very happy indeed.

And then E. organized and directed the putting up of the family heirloom decorations; my two favorites are a miniature cedar-strip canoe and a cubist giraffe.

So now, after some very bad carolling, from me at least, the kids are finally both in bed.

And I must head back upstairs from the subterranean blues room where I am sitting hunched over in front of monitor's dull glow.

Because I have a foot switch to hit before I head to bed to officially thank my true love for putting up that very fine little tree.

OK?

.