Holiday memories gather ‘round the Christmas tree’

Decorating the Christmas tree was a family tradition that created competing emotions. It was exciting to plan the holiday music playlist, stacking the long-playing records on the hi-fi. The carols would embellish the joyful, fa-la-la experience.

Anticipation would border on anxiety, however. Would the chosen tree be too tall and brush the ceiling, leaving no space for the Christmas angel to ascend to the tip-top? Would the base of the trunk be too fat to fit within the red ring of the tree stand?

What is the rule? Measure twice and cut once? My father was a trial-and-error kind of guy. My mother was an “I told you so” type of supervisor.

Inside the big box marked “Christmas lights” lurked one of the great mysteries of the yuletide. How did those strings of multi-colored, jumbo-sized tree lights always manage to devilishly tangle themselves up while lying dormant in the basement during the 11-month off-season?

Cousin Marc had a term for it – the “knot before Christmas.”

After the lights were looped around the tree and stuffed inside to fill any gaps, it was easy-peasy in those days to just switch the bulbs around if one refused to light or it there were too many of one color clustered together.

Hanging the ornaments was the best part of the process. Each ball or trinket had a memory of a Christmas past. Cardinals in a nest were special. They always had a reserved place on an outer bough at child’s-eye level.

The finishing touch, however, was always the application of the silver icicles, also known in some regions as tinsel. Ugh.

Christmas tree icicles were invented in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1610. Originally made from extruded silver that was pounded flat and cut into thin strips, the product was called “lametta.” Since silver tarnishes, tinsel was later made of tin (of course!). Today, lametta is made of shiny plastic materials.

Lametta was a good name for those pesky, staticky strands that caused generations of children to wail, whine, moan and express other sounds of lamentation when asked to help carefully place icicles on the branches. (No tossing was allowed. Just as well throw me in the briar patch.)

Rosemary Washington, a watercolorist and writer based in Seattle, Wash., recalls how her mother instructed her and eight siblings how to carefully lay icicles “strand by single strand, over the needled branches.”

Washington wrote: “I soon grew weary of the tedious task of decking our tree with tinsel. It was so tempting to apply it in clumps, because strand-by-strand was soooo slow!”

(A word to Ms. Washington: “Put yourself in the shoes of an only child.”)

“Mother was so frugal that she saved tinsel from year to year,” Washington said. “That meant that once the holidays were over, we’d have to carefully remove the tinsel, and drape it over our hands so the strands wouldn’t get tangled…another laborious job.”

Clare Ansberry of The Wall Street Journal once wrote: “Tinsel is like fruitcake. People either love those thin, silvery strands of plastic or they hate it.”

Susan Vollenweider of Smithville, Mo., is a foe. “I’m an anti-tinselist,” she said. Icicles are full of static, sticking “to everything but the tree.”

It’s true. For weeks after the tree has been cleared away, the dagnabbit lametta will still turn up around the house, like a Christmas memory for your vacuum cleaner.

“I burn through enough vacuum cleaners without tinsel,” Vollenweider remarked.

Perhaps we should show lametta and tinsel and icicles some mercy…and reflect on the timeless Ukrainian story about the spider and the Christmas tree.

Years and years ago, a poor widow and all her children, living in a tumble-down shack, went to bed on Christmas Eve with heavy hearts. They had grown a tree that they brought inside, but there was no money for ornaments to decorate the tree.

Spiders inhabiting the attic of the humble abode heard the sobs of the children and their sad cries. The spiders decided they would not leave the Christmas tree bare.

They crept downstairs under the cloak of darkness and crawled all over the tree spinning intricate webs. When the Christkind came, he saw what had happened…and transformed the spider webs into silver strands that shimmered in candlelight.