Then there was the year of the Christmas tree shortage. What caused it? How would I know? I didn’t live in a metropolis. Perhaps the merchants selling Christmas trees underestimated their market. Maybe there had been a drought; this was after all Nebraska.

More likely my procrastinating family just waited too long to provide us with a tree. As I’ve told you before I have a good many so-called hillbillies in my family tree. I’m not saying we never hurry. Give us a grizzly sniffing at our heels, or a revenuer loping toward our still, and we can lift feet with the best of them.

Otherwise, as my father always put it, we tend to advance in tractor low.

On the Christmas Eve on which we found ourselves minus a Christmas tree, I was four or possibly five years old. When you’re the only child in a family of three adults you’re always considered a rather pathetic little stinker. I don’t know why. I wasn’t pining for a Christmas tree.

I liked presents, but a Christmas tree was something I could take or leave alone.

To get back to the Christmas tree shortage, the family was more than a little upset. Back in my era the tree wasn’t in play at Thanksgiving time. You went to bed at a proper and decent hour on Christmas Eve and the next morning, early morning, you woke up and there it was in all its brightness and glory.

Santa had brought it. If I didn’t wake up and find my Christmas tree, I’m sure my adults believed, I’d not be believing in Santa Claus.

They needn’t have worried. I had to grow up and get smart before I found out there really was a Santa Claus. As a child I never believed in him for a minute. For one thing we didn’t have central heating until I was nine years old. We had a baseburner. A beautiful thing it was, too, but the pipe coming down from the chimney through which Santa would make his entrance was not a foot in diameter. The baseburner itself wouldn’t have held the fat Santa Claus I was taken to visit in Toyland.

Moreover, my mother, mindful of my manners, always held my hand to trace a thank-you note to whichever relative had sent me a gift the minute the gifts were opened. When I asked what Santa had brought, she explained that the goodies in the Christmas stocking were from him.

I noticed, though, that my uncle, my mother’s elder brother, was always at hand to refill the stockings, when my cousins and I were running out. Had I been asked if I believed in Santa Claus, and had been possessed of the needful vocabulary, my answer would have been something in the nature of &uot;Not bloody likely.&uot;

To get back to the Christmas tree crisis. The family, the adult section of it, was plunged into gloom. My father went off to a Masonic Lodge meeting with absolutely no enthusiasm.

My maternal grandmother, though, who never threw anything away, came up with a solution. From an ancient Sunday School paper, she read a cheerful little story about the family of a missionary. They were doing their religious bit in some country devoid of trees.

The little curly-haired daughter of the missionary took the absence of the tree far harder than I did. She was devastated. Positively broken hearted. Then her mother told her a beautiful story about the Christmas spider. Afterward they made spider webs all over the house with twine and ribbon. And sure enough next morning there was a gift for the curly-haired one in every web.

A spider leaving gifts made better sense to me than a Santa Claus stuffing himself into our baseburner. Anyway, I got to help make those twine webs and it was loads of fun. We probably overdid it a little. Because sometime after I’d gone to sleep, late, late, my father tottered home from his meeting.

He was carrying a Christmas tree that he may or may not have lifted from someone’s porch. We never knew. Bringing it in he managed to trip over every one of those webs.

I heard him come. Next morning everyone told me that Santa Claus had tripped over the spider webs but had brought me a beautiful tree. I admired the tree, which they managed to get decorated. I even had a private moment or two wondering if it might have been Santa Claus.

If so, I thought, he used pretty much the same forbidden words that dad did in moments of irritation.

Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column appears Thursdays.