Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511240079
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO THE BACK PEW
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
My goal for the next four weeks is to become satisfactorily swollen with the Christmas spirit, but not to get bloated or sick of it. I want a Christmas ``buzz'' just short of actual intoxication.
In the past, I've steadfastly refused to allow the Christmas spirit to enter our house before Thanksgiving Day, which, as I've related before, is the actual kick-off to the season for my family.
We - some of us, anyway - actually like to watch Thanksgiving Day parades on TV as we prepare the turkey for the oven. We break out the Christmas music and argue about the relative merits of Bing Crosby's rendition of ``White Christmas'' compared to Leon Redbone's. After dinner, we take our first look at the traditional Christmas movies, including ``A Christmas Carol'' (``Bah, humbug'') and ``A Christmas Story'' (``You'll shoot your eye out.'').
This year, though, we altered the schedule just a bit to get a little whiff of Christmas before Thanksgiving.
The folks who run Dobbins Tree Farm, where we've bought our trees for the past few years, open the place up at the first of November to let regulars - and those lucky enough to see their sign on U.S. 220 north of Eagle Rock - pick out a tree before the crowds get there. It's a good idea, one that some other places use as well. You're assured of getting a good tree without feeling like you have to cut it and put it up before Thanksgiving.
As we walked through the hundreds and hundreds of white pines and spruces earlier this month, the old Christmas glow started to burn. It's an exacting business, this tree selection. The kids have to crawl underneath to check the straightness of the trunk. Color and needle texture must be compared. The height must be just right.
Negotiating a consensus pick isn't quite as difficult as the Bosnian peace talks, but is similarly delicate. We tend to disarm each other with a grin rather than a gun, however.
Wandering through that grove, I found I couldn't stop smiling. Memories were as thick as the pine needles.
A few years ago, we crawled through brush and bramble, my daughters' stockings shredded and bloodied in a post-church search one Sunday afternoon. There were some dark evenings in the rain. Childhood memories of Dad and his brother climbing tall pines on Grandaddy's 180-acre farm to top just the right one for the living room.
And I thought back to that first year my wife and I were married.
We were only months out of college, and though we were both working, there wasn't nearly enough money to buy and decorate a Christmas tree.
Our duplex apartment was nestled in the edge of a few acres of woods just outside of Chapel Hill, N.C. The trees were owned by the local government, which had posted ``no trespassing'' signs all along the woods' boundaries.
Just before dark one evening, Doris and I stole out into the woods, hatchet in hand, looking for something appropriate for the living room. Just far enough off the road so that we wouldn't be seen cutting it down, still visible in the concealing dusk, was a cedar about the right height.
Doris and I took turns whacking at the skinny, peeling trunk until it came down.
It was a real ``Charlie Brown Christmas'' kind of tree. Skinny, bare, ugly, not very green. But, like Charlie Brown's tree, a little love transformed it into something beautiful in our eyes.
We made paper chains from colored construction paper. We strung popcorn. We stole a few ornaments from our families' homes. We baked ornaments out of some flour paste and colored them with markers.
Twenty-two Christmases later, the details of that tree are as fresh as the beautiful spruce we'll cut next weekend for this year's celebration.
That, of course, is the beauty of Christmas. In recalling the birth of that baby who was called Jesus, even non-Christians take time to recall the best in ourselves.
And if we're lucky, we're baking and coloring and building a lifetime of memories to light even the darkest years that could lie ahead.
Don't you love Christmas?
by CNB