The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
Journals of Yesteryear
(First published in the Sunday Sentinel in Nacogdoches, Texas, December 9, 1979.)
A Texas Christmas Tree
by Larry L. Dill
I grew up in San Antonio, a charming city in many ways, but the only native trees around my neighborhood were thorny mesquites and a few scrubby live oaks. Further west toward the hill country where I spent many summers, red cedar juniper abounds.
That same red cedar stretched northward to the Brazos river valley in North Texas where my maternal grandparents had a farm. Ironically, the farm also had nothing on it but live oaks and mesquite. Most of the 100 odd acres was open pasture and cultivated fields.
But my grandparents lived less than a mile from the Brazos and each year my grandmother, who in her later years looked like Mrs. Santa Clause to me--short, round and single minded-- would lead my cantankerous grandfather in his ragged chore coat and half tied boots to the craggy cliffs above the river to cut a Christmas tree. I can hear him now. “Ei God, Grace, I wish you’d make up your mind.”
By the time we got there on Christmas eve the tree would be installed in the living room, trimmed and surrounded by the most elegantly wrapped presents I have ever seen. Mamaw, as I called her, always seemed to give large gifts like quilts or roasting pans or cowboy hats that took huge boxes. She wrapped the presents in thick, shiny white paper and tied them up with miles of colored ribbon that seemed a foot wide.
By contrast, my mother who had to decorate the sticky and stickery limbs of a Brazos Christmas tree, now bought her tree each year at the grocery store--a carefully chosen Scotch pine which with the help of fake snow from a can of shaving cream, smelled like Christmas itself to me. Dad would build a wooden stand and I would hear them rattling around in the kitchen after my brother and I were in bed, wrapping presents and talking in low voices so as not to give away any secrets.
By the time I was in high school the price of store bought trees had gotten so high that Mom came home one Christmas with the latest thing: a reusable aluminum tree. I was crushed. The tree was, admittedly, made well and an attractive adornment to our house. But for me it was not a Christmas tree. We did not have family councils in our house and my complaints were ignored.
By the time Elaine and I were married ten years later, I’d grown so politically radical about the unnecessary cutting of trees and so cynical about my mother’s heedless break with tradition that our first Christmas was spent around a dead limb retrieved from the yard and mounted upright like a Christmas tree with a few ecologically sound hand made ornaments deftly placed among its fragile branches. It was not unattractive to my eyes. It had the look of something abstract like you would see in a department store window. It projected the austere beauty of deciduous trees in winter. But neither was it our ideal tree. The next year, our first child’s first Christmas, we tried again to change tradition with a fresh, green potted Norfolk pine. It, too, made a lovely tree; but by the third year we had returned to the ageless tradition of our grandparents and gone to the cliffs above the Colorado River near Austin and cut down a magnificent eastern red cedar (Juniperus Virginiana). Guiltless we dragged it home and filled up our living room with it and smiled. At last a Texas Christmas tree.
During the next few years our dreams of returning to the land grew dim as our distance from the country increased. We went to Dallas to work and then to Houston where having more money than time we reverted to parking lot Christmas tree safaris and even sank to snobbery our last Christmas in the city by decadently carrying home one of the most expensive trees on the lot.
New Hope, our new home, has many red cedars, some of which we used for the foundation of our house. In years to come, as I selectively cut the larger ones for use on the homestead and to clear the land for gardens, we will use the tops for Christmas trees. And each year we will burn the tree after Christmas in our wood stove--all but the very top which we’ll save to rekindle the Christmas fire the following year.
Elaine’s and my dreams of living in harmony with our land, of weaving our childhood memories into our hopes for the future, have for the first time in our lives become possible; and we imagine ourselves in our dotage traipsing around together in our little woods carefully lining up the Christmas trees of the future. “This one next year and year after next maybe that one.”
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November 2008 New Hope Journal
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copyright 2008 by Larry L. Dill