The Best Christmas Tree Ever

A year ago today, I was taking down our Christmas tree and was struck by a memory.  This led to a little, illustrated, post-holiday essay which I sent to my sisters and a few close friends.  I had been toying with the idea of a blog and this piece [and the kind replies I received] encouraged me to begin ‘Images and More’.

Full of New Year’s resolve, I hope to be more diligent and disciplined with this enterprise in 2012.  There will be more state houses and Passed President stories.  There will be actual learning and development to apply and share.  It being an election year, there could very well be a rant or two.  I hope you won’t mind that part but it is my platform.  It might help to retain my extremely small readership (The Marketing Department prefers to call it ‘EXCLUSIVE’) if I include a warning label like the ‘Parental Discretion Advised’ stickers on music CD’s. 

So, contrary to all that, I begin the year by recycling an old story.  No warning label necessary.

Happy New Year.

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January 2011

There was something special about this year’s Christmas tree.  Every year, the subject of changing to an artificial tree comes up.  We are in a store and the same dialog occurs - yes, it would pay for itself in no time and yes, we should not be part of the grow-cut-throw out abuse of resources.

Then, every year, we get a REAL tree, with real branches and real needles and that real evergreen smell.  We pay the bucks and schlep the thing home, light a fire and decorate it while listening to holiday tunes.  We both thought this year’s tree was the best ever.  It was taller but it fit the small space we had for it just right.  The ornaments we have accumulated over the years and the lights made it something you just wanted to hang with…even after the gifts were opened and gone.

My Bride is a Ripley and she has the family drive that must move on to the next task at hand.  That’s one of the things that make them such an accomplished family.  By January 6^th, she decided Christmas was over and the house had to be restored to its pre-holiday appearance.  It wasn’t until the tree was ready to drag out of the house that I remembered something.

Fifty years ago this holiday season, I was supposed to die.  On December 11^th 1960, I was taken to the Bronx Municipal Hospital Center with double lobar pneumonia and a collapsed lung.  By December 15^th, infections spread outside the lungs to the chest cavity.  I was transferred to a tuberculosis hospital [yes, they had them in those days] and a police car was sent to fetch my mother so someone could be with me when the end came. 

I guess I had other plans.  As Christmas passed and New Year’s approached, I was out of immediate danger and the family told me about how terrific our tree was that year.  It was a Scotch pine and it looked so beautiful, they promised to keep it up until I came home.  Of course, no one expected that I would be released from the hospital on Valentine’s Day.

The joke around the house by then was that even the cat walking by the tree was enough to make needles fall.  Everyone stayed clear of the room so as not to shake any more dry needles off the thing.  After 64 days of hospitalization, I was very happy to be alive and home and the tree looked wonderful even if it was dry and droopy.

So these memories came flooding back to me AFTER I had taken this year’s tree down to the bare branches.  Had I realized it sooner, I would have insisted on keeping it up longer…maybe not until Valentine’s Day but longer in memory of that trying period in my young life. 

I guess these thoughts stimulated the morbid parts of my brain.  With the realization that the best tree ever was being hauled to the curb, it just seemed like I was dragging a body there…like bringing out the dead during the Great Plague.  The tree, just a day before, was a bright, shining, festive symbol.  Now it was a corpse waiting to be hauled away.  Sad.

In fact, it reminded me of a crime scene. 

The CSI people have just left.  Preliminary determination was that the tree’s death was neither suspicious nor noteworthy.  The town is littered with the bodies of dearly departed conifers that made the Supreme Sacrifice…giving their all so that we might enjoy the Holidays.

R.I.P.