The Elder Statesman

Every year I say it will be a small tree this year, perhaps one that will fit on top of a table, but I know I won’t succeed there either. The only year I almost got away with not having a Christmas tree was in 1998, just a year after I had suffered a massive heart attack that came on while I was defrocking the 1997 Christmas tree. I still have memories of lying on the living room carpet talking to a 911 operator while waiting for the emergency medical crew to arrive.

I say almost because that was the year I had said no tree, but two days before Christmas I walked out of a supermarket and saw a "free" sign tacked on a sad looking fir that obviously hadn’t sold and wouldn’t sell before Christmas.

I don’t know whether it was that I felt sorry for the sad looking tree, or if it was that four letter word, free. I loaded it into my truck and took it home. It required some artistic endeavor, like pruning it into an acceptable shape and even adding some of the limbs I had pruned just to fill in where nature failed.

Once I had placed the lights and ornaments around the tree, it still looked a bit sad, even when the red headed angel topped its mishapened peak. I decided to drape it head to foot with aluminum icicles until it looked like a spider had spung magic around its branches. Once it was finished, I stood back to admire it. There is only one word to describe that once forlorn fir: Beautiful.

When I looked at that tree, I was reminded of a 1885 television piece done by the late Charles Kuralt, the folksy CBS newsman whose reports from the small towns and back roads of America were electronic poetry. It was about just such a tree, one growing in rocky soil on the high plateau of Colorado that Kuralt did a film essay. Each year the gnarled juniper growing on the side of U.S. 50 that each year was decorated for Christmas but nobody seemed to know by whom.

Kuralt said the tree had no business growing there because trees didn’t grow in that rocky soil, but this juniper somehow survived year after year through summer droughts, winter storms and even caused the highway department to detour around it when widening the highway. To Kuralt that bedraggled juniper held the Christmas message that there is hope and peace even in a world gone mad.

Perhaps that is what I saw in that sad little fir that was just days away from a chipper. I helped it celebrate Christmas and I am sure it overheard visitors to my home saying it was "the most beautiful tree they had seen all season."

Of course I could join the modern generation and settle for a predecorated artificial Christmas tree, but somehow I don’t think that was Martin Luther’s idea when he gave us the Christmas tree tradition.

Therefore, I will be hunting for a real Christmas tree again this year even though it may be a tad more perfect specimen than that 1998 free tree, but I assure you one will be standing tall in my living room as Christmas approaches. It will probably be dripping with icicles too.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470, or by e-mail at elderstatesmansblog@yahoo.com) 
 
 

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.