Mom hated to part with her Christmas tree. She kept it standing in our modest living room, by a radiator no less, and admired its beauty well into April.
I have a feeling it brightened her day and brought a smile to others. Neighbors did not think of her as odd but someone who wanted to tag a few extra months onto Christmas.
By the time she was ready to discard the balsam fir, its appearance resembled a “Charlie Brown” tree. The rug was covered with needles. The branches sagged. It had outlived its time, but Mom paid little heed to its longevity.
What bothered her were the inconsiderate souls who heaved their tree out the door a day after Christmas, apparently fed up with this whole Yuletide business.
Tell me, is there anything so sad as to see a Christmas tree in the gutter with a few strands of tinsel wavering in the wind? To Mom, that was downright revolting.
“Have they no respect for a living plant,” she would wail. “It’s one thing to cut it down, then neglect to give it water. But send it outdoors to winter’s elements? Least they could have done is wait a few days until Epiphany or Little Christmas.”
It didn’t matter if gifts were exchanged, parties were attended, or cards sent. All that was superfluous far as Mom was concerned. Once Dad brought it home and situated it into a stand, the rest was Mom’s department.
She handled the decorating with precision, using ornaments handed down from generations.
Her actions were the butt end of jokes from the neighborhood, though it did set some kind of a curiosity trend. I’d bring a school friend over for February vacation and right away the tree would become an instant eye-catcher.
“You still have your tree up?” they would mutter. “Is this some kind of an ethnic custom? We got rid of ours just before New Year’s. Talk about getting your money’s worth.”
I must tell you. Mom had her priorities straight, eccentric as she was at times. She was one of those diehards who felt that every day should be Christmas, not once a year. She thought people should be giving of themselves every hour of each day.
As a genocide survivor, bad as things were in her native Turkey, there was always a tree in her home. The tradition may have originated back during the advent of World War II. Living in a three-tenement flat with other family immigrants, she sent my Dad out for a tree on Christmas Eve.
Off he went into the woods and cut down anything he could get his hands around. Busy as times were back then with seven-days-a-week jobs in the coffee shop, that tree got decorated in time for Christmas. Even back then, Mom was reluctant to dismantle it for months. It drove Dad crazy every time he stepped on the needles with his stocking feet. One year we housed a rambunctious cat and over it fell, ornaments and all.
Later, I found out her secret to preserve the trees. She’d water it religiously, no doubt about that, crawling under the base with a pitcher in hand. Plant food was another necessity. But there was another ingredient that extended the life of her trees.
Hairspray!
You got it. She would spritz the branches with hairspray, claiming it kept the branches alive longer by blocking the plant’s pores, allowing it to retain more water.
Some years later, when Mom was well along in years, she instilled the same habits into us children. My late brother was also a late discarder, as was I, keeping my tree aloft until well into January.
As siblings, we were also practical jokers. My brother was never short of a prank and I found no problem in retaliating.
I was working at the Gazette and one Christmas, my telephone rang off the hook from incredulous callers.
“Is this the place that sells $5 Christmas trees?” they inquired.
“What? Who? Where?”
“Says so in the paper. There’s an ad that reads Christmas trees for sale. Any size. Your choice for $5.”
There it was in black and white. Someone had bamboozled me with a fake publicity stunt. It wasn’t until Christmas day when the truth surfaced at the dinner table and my brother handing me a lollypop.
“Sucker!” he cried, bowling over with laughter.
I fixed his wagon with a dose of his own medicine. A week or two after Christmas, I ran an ad in his hometown paper.
“We accept discarded Christmas trees.”
In one day, his yard resembled a wind-swept forest in the aftermath of a tornado.
Tom Vartabedian
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