Anatomy of a Christmas Tree

It all starts when you find yourself walking through muddy fields with several children and a handsaw at one of those cut-your-own-tree places. You have to have several children so they can argue about which tree to cut down. This is part of the experience. If that does not happen, you missed out on part of the fun. If they actually agree on a tree, the experience is just not as it should be. Anyway, once you disagree on a tree and argue about it, you cut down the tree, carry it for miles (I may exaggerate) and pay too much for the tree.

Paying too much is also part of the experience. It is like going to the county fair. The food costs too much, but you buy it anyway because if you don't, you missed part of the fun of going to the fair. It is just part of the deal. And you have to complain about it because that is just what you do. It makes the experience better. But moving on, once you put the overpriced tree in the back of your truck, you then watch other people in small cars looking at the big tree they cut down, stand around trying to figure out just how they are going to get their tree home. Silly people. Planning ahead never occurred to them. You and your children laugh at them as you drive away.

Once the tree is home, you put it in the tree stand you had to look for for at least an hour even though you knew where you left it last year. It is just that it moves all by itself with some sort of freakish Christmas osmosis. Then you ask your kids to eyeball it while you tighten the screws to make sure it is straight. After 20 minutes, you crawl out from under the tree, cast an eye upon it yourself, and then crawl back under the tree to straighten it out as apparently children do not know the meaning of the word "straight."

Once that is done, you put on the lights. These should be the old style, C7 incandescent glass bulbs that get hot enough to burn your fingers. You need those large incandescent lights. You just do. They are "right." Some lights are not right. Those little tiny lights are for the French. And LEDs? No, don't do that. Plastic lights have no place on a Christmas tree. It is not only wrong, is just plain embarrassing. Anyway, the standard colors are red, blue, orange, green, and white. If you have purple lights, remove those as purple lights are not something you should do to your tree. And the lights should face up as they are supposed to mimic the flame of a candle and flames go up and therefore so should the lights. Also, you need to add a couple twinkle lights for the blinkie effect. Once you have enough lights on the tree to continually blow out the circuit breaker, take a few lights back off the tree, and your light count is correct. Oh, a couple "bubble lamps" are good to have in your light string also. If you do not know what bubble lights are, you need to ask an old person. They will know.

After the lights are on, you must hang some green/red construction paper chain which your kids have made on the tree. It is just one of those things you do. Those chain links are stapled together. Every year you buy a new stapler to do this, and then find the other dozen staplers you have bought in previous years only after the job is done. After you are done making the chain, you add the new stapler to the stapler stash knowing you will once again buy another new stapler next year. If you don't have children or paper chains, then garland is an acceptable substitute and is in fact encouraged. Silver color is your best bet, just remember it goes on in a loopy horizontal manner, not vertically.

Then of course, you need ornaments. This is a combination of glass bulbs that break if you drop them, home-made ornaments, kid-made ornaments, plastic animals and such ornaments, and some ornaments that visitors will look at and wonder, "What the heck is that doing on the tree?" That is because you need things on the tree that mean something to you, but not to anyone else. As far as home made ornaments in this tree, you see an ornament made from a slice of Christmas tree trunk from 2008 with a picture of a kid on it. If you squint, you can also see an ornament which a kid painted a blue horse on. "Why the blue horse?" is not a relevant question. It is just the way it is. In any case, someone has to break at least one ornament. That, too, is part of the experience. If there are no broken ornaments, Christmas will not be complete. If no one accidentally breaks an ornament, you must break one on purpose. It is that important. And one more thing--do not put any ornament on the tree with a sports team theme you bought from a TV advertisement. Just don't do that. But if you foolishly bought one in the past, you can go ahead and break that one for the year's needed broken ornament. In fact, break it anyway even if you already have broken an ornament.

Oh, and you need a pickle ornament. If you know not what that is all about, you need to look it up as you are missing out on a Christmas tree tradition. But I will tell you because you will not look it up anyway. In Germany, it was tradition for people to hide a Christmas pickle on the tree. The kid who found it first got to open the first present. This story has proven to be false, but it is tradition now, so it does not matter if it is false. You just do it. And of course you need your plastic star-shaped tree topper with a white light in the middle of it. We used to have an angel tree topper, but after many years of having a Christmas tree poked up its butt, it can no longer be found at Christmas time. I think it hides in the garage counting its blessings but I can not be sure. But an angel tree topper is acceptable if you can find one.

Anyway, once lights, tree topper, paper chain, ornamentation, including the pickle, is all done, you put on tinsel. When kids are small, you tell them, "Put the tinsel on one at a time, not in a blob," then after they put blobs of tinsel all over the tree and have gone to bed, you fix the tinsel and pretend you didn't. And when the kids get up the next morning, they know you fixed the tinsel, but they pretend you didn't. It is all part of the deal. Well, anyway, you know you have enough tinsel when you have too much and then put more on. That is the minimum required. Once the tinsel starts blocking out the lights, that is the maximum needed. Either that or put on more lights and keep on tinseling. Basically, you can't have too much tinsel, only too little.

Candy canes should also be part of the ensemble, and they should be of the peppermint red/white stripe variety. Don't go with any other flavor or with those goofy multi-colored candy canes. You will feel sorry later about doing such a thing once you realize how wrong it was for doing it in the first place. If you plan to eat those candy canes later, you must use Spangler Candy Canes as all others are cheap imitations. Spangler is only real candy cane.

Then if you have a train, you put it around the bottom of the tree and tell the kids not to run it too fast or it will fall off the track. Then you put it back on the track once they run it too fast and it falls off the track. Then you spill water all over the floor while watering the tree. You cuss but hope your kids did not hear you. They hear you but pretend they didn't.

And if you have one of those artificial silver tinsel Christmas trees from the 60s with the revolving multicolored light wheels shining on it, put that up also. Those are cool. In fact, if you have one of those, ship it to me and I will be its caretaker. Those are Christmas classics and should be treated as such. If you have one of those you are pretty much king of the Christmas tree.

But anyway, that is the lesson in Christmas treeism for today.? And once you have it all set up and are there looking at it in the dark that night, thank God that you still can because many people did not make it through this year.