Unforgettable Christmas Trees
written by Lane Hudson
In the fall, when dad and I hunted the fields and woods around Cartledge Creek and the River Hills, we kept an eye open for the perfect tree for Christmas. Once the tree was found, we would return at Christmas with a saw and an axe. This was acceptable where we hunted. One Christmas, when I was 10, after we had been hunting for several hours, I told dad I wanted to rest. I watched him disappear over a nearby hill while I rested. Before long, I heard his shotgun blast at least a half dozen times. Then, I heard him yelling, “Hey boy, come here, I got a good one. She’s going to be real pretty in the house!” I ran to the top of the hill to see what wild animal deserved so many shotgun blasts, and would look pretty in our house. What a surprise! He was dragging a perfectly shaped cedar tree, the trunk shattered and splintered by shotgun pellets. “I was afraid I couldn’t remember this place,” he said, out of breath. “So I used my gun.”
After Christmas, we couldn’t decide whether to burn the tree, or give it a burial service.
In 1978, I had the good fortune to spend the last two weeks of December, including Christmas day, in the hospital with pneumonia. (It was a sympathy ploy. My girlfriend had just dumped me.) I was tied by plastic tubing to an I.V. pole. Several days before Christmas, I awoke from a nap to giggling family and nurses who had turned my I.V. pole into a poor substitute for a Christmas tree. Wrapped in red and green ribbons, candy-cane fashion, with ornaments and an angel on top, it was pretty, in an ugly kind of way. Later in the evening, my roommate pushed my metal Christmas tree while I pushed him in his wheelchair through the hospital corridors singing Christmas carols. (For insurance reasons, we were banned from the cardiac care ward because of our poor singing.)
But the Christmas tree that I’ll never forget was the one I saw on July 4, 1973, in the middle of the night. I was driving alone on a two-lane country blacktop in southeast N.C. to Myrtle Beach. The houses were far apart; the darkness punctuated by occasional security lights. Then, I saw in the distance on my left a Christmas tree, fully lit, in the front yard of a small farmhouse. And not a light was on in the house.
The Christmas lights had been on up for a long time. Probably once carefully strung, they sagged, looking very tired. This farmhouse with its Christmas tree offered the brightest light for miles on this July 4th night.
Then I remembered where I was: Ft. Bragg was 20 miles away, and soldiers were coming home from Vietnam. Maybe the father and mother sleeping inside the house thought a simple candle in the window wasn’t enough. Perhaps a Christmas homecoming had been delayed and unopened gifts were still inside the house. I want to believe their son or daughter made it home from Southeast Asia, amid great celebration.
But happy endings don’t always occur. There is reality, and as in all wars, maybe the soldier’s gifts were never opened, and the tired July Christmas tree was eventually unplugged.
If so, there is no darker road in the world to travel.