The Children’s Christmas Tree

by Donna Hruska

The year we changed our image of the ideal Christmas tree was the year we had five pre-schoolers. That was the year the twins were a year old. It was also the year that the tree was knocked over twice, soaking sugar water into the draperies and carpet, breaking the top branches and smashing some of my treasured antique ornaments. Somehow, as I floundered around inside that mass of prickly pine needles, slivers of glass and soppy carpet, I just knew I wouldn’t be able to cope with another Christmas if something wasn’t done about the tree.

Part of my problem, I realized as I struggled to detach the broken stand from the bottom of the tree, was that I was carrying around a completely unrealistic vision of the perfect Christmas tree. Born in the years when I left the farm for college, where the tree in the dorm had stood in glorious magnificence in the well of the winding staircase and nurtured by years of multi-colored photographs in the house and garden magazines, the tree of my dreams had grown all out of proportion in both size and perfection. What I really had in mind, I reflected as I pulled the broken pieces out into the garage, was something on the order of President Nixon’s tree in the Rose Garden in Washington, preferably with the White House in the background and the Marine Band playing a medley of Christmas music on the side. Such would never be in a family with five little children, I concluded, as the last of the mess went into the trash can.

I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down to think as best I could with the twins screaming their indignation at being put into the playpen and their three older brothers wailing with every other breath, “Aren’t we going to have a Christmas tree? We’ve got to have a Christmas tree!”

I had never been one of those to declare that Christmas was for children. Adults have some claim to it, too, but I was about ready to admit that perhaps Christmas trees belonged to children a little bit more than to parents. I refused to put the tree in the playpen or on a high table as some of my friends had done. Gradually, a different idea began to take shape–nothing earth-shattering–but a completely changed idea of what Christmas trees should be.

I began by asking my husband to buy the biggest, sturdiest tree stand he could find. Then, while the wide-eyed moppets stood in the garage door and watched, I worked what improvements I could on our damaged tree with saw and pruning shears.

After naps that day we assembled drawing paper, rolls of foil, crayons, paste and string. Using cookie cutters for patterns, the boys made their own ornaments. By evening, our trimmed scotch pine was preening in angels whose wings looked as poorly coordinated as the small hands that held the scissors to cut them out, Santas with red-crayoned suits liberally smeared with dried paste, foil stars that glittered with wrinkles. They were not the kind of hand-made decorations you see in holiday magazines. I’m not even sure you could say they had charm. They did have other special qualities.

Every year now, newly made ornaments are added to the old, and as the artists age and gain more cub scout, 4-H and school art experience, their skill improves. Still, the high point comes when we open the box of old ornaments from previous years. Each child remembers which ones he created and hangs them carefully, in all their pasty, ragged, scribbled elegance in the best spots on the tree. They are his gifts of love to the family and to the Child whose birthday we are celebrating.

And after all, that’s what Christmas is all about, anyway, isn’t it?