How It Was: “Deck the Halls” (Excerpt)

[from How It Was: Christmas, copyright etc., so on and so forth, by John E. Simpson]

Some of The Boy’s friends, he knew, had fathers who every year converted their houses into Las Vegas-style Christmas theme parks: marquees of flashing lights running around the walls and eaves of the exterior and all around every window, and glowing translucent holiday figures on the lawn and roof, Santa Claus and reindeer and snowmen.

Some of The Boy’s friends had fathers like that. But The Boy’s own father, a rugged individualist to the core, permitted only one exterior ornament: the holly wreath on the front door.

It was the dark side of holiday decor, a holly wreath from hell. Forget fluffy cotton snow scenes and the delicate tracery of paper snowflakes, this was reality. This holly wreath was even bigger across than the fruitcake mixing bowl, fifteen inches at least, and the holly leaves had been spray-painted with some kind of hard glossy thin shell that did not smooth out the leaves’ spiny edges but accentuated them. The Boy could not even look at this holly wreath without being stabbed, painfully.

Moreover, he had never seen either his father or his mother handle it: one moment it was safely sheathed in its cardboard box, the next it was hanging, malevolent and spiky, on the front door; neither parent’s hands ever showed the expected tell-tale cuts and wounds from the holly leaves. Maybe they wore leather gauntlets. Secretly, The Boy imagined that the wreath’s true purpose was to defend against the Christmas burglars the adults talked about every year, who as they tried to sneak in the front door to steal all the toys would be lacerated mercilessly when the wreath fell on their heads and necks. For weeks, The Boy would enter and leave his house from the back door.

Most windows in the house were occupied by a single-bulb candle. Upstairs, in the bedrooms of The Boy and his brother and sisters, there were also hung faded green and red pseudo-holly wreaths — loops of twisted wire “leafed” with some sort of stiff painted bristles. Up close, they reminded The Boy of the toilet-bowl brush in his grandparents’ bathroom.

But in the big window in the front room, the picture window — ah, there was an ornamental feast!

All along the window sill ran a pavement of cotton. In the center of its length was a hollow green miniature ceramic Christmas tree, opaque but for the bits of colored glass at the tips of its branches through which a forty-watt bulb shone its magic light, night after holiday night.

And to either side of this tree ranged an orchestra of elfin musicians, crafted (like the instruments themselves) of pipe-cleaners and sequined cardboard. For some unfathomable reason, The Boy and his siblings never played with these musicians. Perhaps the little figurines were too sacred. Or perhaps The Boy just never wanted to interrupt the one carol — and, really, just its first syllable — which the elves were always singing, in his mind: “O Christmas Tree.”

Now, it might reasonably be expected that the elves offered this serenade to the miniature tree they flanked on the window sill. But The Boy knew that they really did so for the real tree, the one that would occupy the corner adjacent to the picture window: the monster.

Other boys’ fathers selected trees on such mundane grounds as its shape, and whether or not it would fit into the tree stand. But The Boy’s father was an artist, a frustrated artist who every December 24th sculpted a new masterpiece out of raw evergreen. The only criteria for the tree were that it had to be green, at least when purchased, and that it had to be big.

The act of creation began with a ceremonial spreading of newspapers on the living-room floor, in roughly the size and shape of a prostrate evergreen. In came the tree, borne by The Boy’s father in a rustling, thrashing, rattling, knuckle-bashing trip through the front door, the deadly wreath swishing back and forth on its wire hanger like the pendulum in a horror story, all to the accompaniment of merry holiday music on the hi-fi and the first of The Boy’s father’s annual holiday curses, muffled into inaudibility by the tree’s enormous branches swatting him about the mouth and neck. The tree barely fit through the door but The Boy’s father — in a prefiguring of things to come — made it fit, by damn.

The tree lay then on the newspaper, unconscious, anæsthetized by the cold, awaiting its fate. The Boy’s father removed his gloves, his hooded sweatshirt; stared down hard at the tree; appraised his chances for a successful surgery.

Satisfied, he pursed his lips and nodded, and instructed The Boy: “Get me the saw.”

His father’s shop being what it was, The Boy was gone long enough for his father to have at least one cigarette and also to confirm the continued acceptability of the strong-smelling contents of the secret bottles. Then The Boy returned to the front room with the sacred implement and lay it, reverently, in the craftsman’s hands, retreating to the safety of the sofa to watch.

First, The Boy could see, the object was to shave off a tiny slice from the very base of the tree trunk. You needed to preserve as much of the trunk as possible for some reason — perhaps the wood was more valuable down there at the bottom — but you needed to take something off down there because the stump was sealed over with frozen sap, and the thirsty tree (its needles already raining down everywhere but onto the newspapers) would need to drink.

Next you took a steel tape measure and measured the height of the corner itself, floor to ceiling; you couldn’t risk the possibility that seismic activity (always a problem in southern New Jersey) had changed the house’s dimensions since last year. You compared this height to the height of the tree; you sucked at your upper lip; you had another cigarette as your mind ran over the complex holiday geometry again and again.

You measured the tree-top ornament next, the daffy shiny-gold plastic spike tufted with angel’s hair; in order to make room for that, you carefully measured and cut off the top twelve inches of the tree accordingly. Perfect.

Then you laboriously shaved all around the base of the tree trunk using a pocket knife reserved strictly for everyday household use like Christmas-tree carving and cleaning your nails, a pocket knife big and lethal as a machete.

And now, finally — this was the master stroke, the mark of the true artist, and it had to be done just right — now you fastened the tree stand to the bottom of the trunk and very carefully neglected to measure its added height.

Not even a minute more would go by and you’d see the first proud results, the first evidence that once again you were en route to Christmas-tree perfection: that long, straight, narrow gouge in the ceiling paint, carved there by the pointed tip of the tree-top ornament. The feet of the tree stand would be firmly on the floor but the tree itself — up at the top — would be canted over at a wondrous thirty-degree angle, unable to fit vertically, jammed between floor and ceiling. You would stand back, hands on hips, and softly invoke the name of the baby whose birth you were preparing to celebrate.

Then down with the tree, off with the tree-top ornament, and off, finally, with the additional five inches or so of the tree’s height — removed, always and only, from the top.

There it was at last, ready for the placement of the lights, ornaments, and tinsel: another perfect Christmas tree, now having lost enough foliage from the top that it had lost that ugly conical shape, too. A perfect evergreen cylinder, with the tree-top ornament projecting like a golden spindle from the top, as though precisely pinning the tree to the ceiling.

An annual ecumenical miracle: a gigantic evergreen dreidel.