The old fake Christmas tree has been through a lot.

Saturday, December 08, 2001

The old fake Christmas tree has been through a lot.

It’s the same tree my parents put up year after year for most of my childhood. I specifically remember taking the tree down as early as 1988 (I remember the year because the Vikings’ famed playoff game against the 49ers was on TV that day), but I know we had the tree for years before that.

That tree was part of our family Christmas every year, although sometimes it looked different. Some years we strung cranberries and hung them (by January, they weren’t looking good); other years we strung popcorn -well, we strung the stuff we didn’t eat first. My brother and I always lobbied to have colorful lights and bulbs all over it, but my mom got into a phase where only white lights were acceptable. We bemoaned this so much that one year, they bought us a separate, live tree we were allowed to decorate however we wanted.

Three or four years ago, after I was moved out and married, my parents got a different tree and gave us the old one.

The tree has been stored for many years in a large appliance box; I’m not sure what kind of appliance it was, but the box is probably four feet long, three feet deep and two or three feet wide. I’m sure it was nice and sturdy at first, but it’s now floppy and duct-taped together. Every time I lift it, I’m afraid the tree will spill out all over.

When we moved from the Fergus Falls area to Albert Lea, we almost lost the tree. We had stored it in the attic of the old house, and in our haste to move, we forgot to even go up there and get our stuff. A few months later, I wondered aloud to my wife, &uot;Did we bring the Christmas tree here?&uot; We both looked dumbfounded as it dawned on us what had happened. I ended up making a special trip to retrieve it, along with other Christmas decorations and baby clothes that were up there.

Well, last weekend, I took that duct-taped box down from the rafters in our garage and dragged it inside, prepared to call that old tree into service for another year.

The poor thing is in bad shape. Probably ten years ago, my dad taped labels on each branch, marking it with a number from one through eight. This corresponded with the eight levels of branches on the tree – the longer branches were level one, on up to the shortest ones on level eight. Well, half of the labels had fallen off, and when I sorted them into piles based on number or length, I had way too many in some piles and not enough in other piles.

An hour later, when I finally had them sorted out, I went through the painstaking process of re-labling every branch.

When it came time to insert each branch into its hole in thee wooden &uot;trunk&uot; of the tree, there were more problems. The holes were worn so badly that the lower branches sagged horribly, and some would not stay lodged in the holes. I solved this by drilling the holes deeper, but the lower branches still droop a little.

Topping it off, the base we inherited is in bad shape. It holds the trunk in place with three screws that go inward from the sides; however, the base is so worn that the screws don’t press firmly against the wood anymore; instead, they slip sideways and and up grazing against the side. This does not hold the tree in place very well. As a result, the tree titls a few degrees to one side, which we attempted to correct by shoving spiral notebooks under one end of the base. This keeps it from falling down, but the tree still leans noticeably.

So we’ve got a saggy, leaning tree in the corner of the living room. This will probably be the last year for the old tree. Maybe we’ll go with a real one next time.

But no matter how bad the tree is, I still like having it in the room. One of the first things I do when I get home is plug in the lights and take a good look at the tree. If you stand in the right place, you can’t tell it’s leaning.

It’s moments like those – along with seeing all the nicely lit houses at night, or driving downtown early in the morning when the decorations look down on empty streets – that make it feel like Christmas.

Dylan Belden is the Tribune’s managing editor. His column appears Sundays. E-mail him at dylan.belden@albertleatribune.com.