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Christmas Trees

David Sapp

    Each Christmas, we never missed our tradition of complaining over and poking fun at Grandpa’s selection cut from Tom Kline’s place just up the road and around the bend from the Quarry Chapel. There’s evidence in snapshots, a chronology of every lopsided, bedraggled tree since 1963. Trees already too threadbare shed half their needles between the truck and the front room, and there was usually an empty nest as if the birds knew all was lost. All the boughs were bent in tortured contortions after too much enthusiasm for – a vast overcompensation of – lights, tinsel and bulbs, all an obvious, comical and ineffectual camouflage. For years, we assumed there was a fault in his aesthetics. Maybe someone with a keen eye for symmetry should tag along next year. But then, months later, come Thanksgiving, we’d all forget.
    Just recently, an aunt divulged an astonishing detail: Grandpa didn’t want the best trees. Those should thrive a little longer. He purposefully chose the hopeless, a charity, giving them a last warm holiday. Though a rather rigid, narrow old Catholic, often betraying the limitations of an eighth-grade education, there was a deep sensitivity, a mystery, of which we were unaware. I wondered if he talked with his trees, stroked and patted their limbs, explained the circumstances, apologized and mourned their demise. When aunts, uncles and cousins filled the house at Christmas, as the grandkids ripped open, fought and cried over presents, he leaned back in his recliner, quietly content with his selection.

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