The closer it got to Christmas, the more anxious we were to have a tree.
“Can you get it this weekend, Dad?” we asked.
My father would slog through our field in boots or snowshoes, depending on the amount of snow blanketing it. An hour or so later, he’d emerge from the woods hauling an evergreen on the toboggan or dragging it through the snow.
We waited, with both anticipation and fear.
Would it be tall and thick? Or short and scrawny?
Getting the Christmas tree was a big deal when we were growing up in Skowhegan in the 1960s.
Most kids in the neighborhood had their trees in the house and decorated by late November or early December.
We were always the last to trim one because our father was practical and said the tree would dry out or become a fire hazard if we got it more than a week before Christmas.
He’d lug the tree into the house, the poignant scent of fir filling each room, and stand it up in the corner of the living room. He’d tip it this way and that, as we eyed its possibilities.
Most years, our trees were spectacular, all adorned with string lights that were big and hot, old glass ornaments and those we made at school from acorns and pine cones tied with ribbon and sprinkled with white stuff to make it look like snow. Lastly, we tossed tinsel onto the branches, crafted a star from cardboard, covered it with tinfoil and tacked it to the tree top.
Some years, if the tree looked too skeletal, we were forced to do some tweaking.
That wasn’t hard because my brother, Matt, was resourceful. He would drill holes in the trunk at strategic locations and plug in big fir bows he fetched from the woods — transforming even the most pathetic tree into a beauty. He also was handy with fishing line: if the tree was in danger of toppling over, he’d tie it to the ceiling or wall and you’d never suspect the tree was precariously perched.
The neighborhood kids always admired our Christmas tree because it was huge, one year even stretching out into the room several feet as we landed a whopper that resembled a bush, with both ends chopped off.
I was the youngest of seven and, as my siblings graduated from high school and left the nest, my sister Jane and I did the nagging, trying to persuade our father to collect the tree earlier in December.
One year when we were young teenagers, we decided to just do it ourselves.
It was about 10 days before Christmas and it had snowed continuously through the night, dumping nearly two feet on the field and in the woods.
And it was cold; the temperatures hovered around zero that day.
We dressed in long underwear and tall boots and headed out to the barn where we retrieved the toboggan and an axe and trudged north to the woods.
It was a hard trek with the snow so deep but we didn’t mind. We were on a mission.
We entered the woods where snow wound through stands of trees, deeper in some places than in others, affording us intermittent respites.
Finding the right tree was harder than we’d imagined. Some were too tall, some too thin, some too short and squat.
We began to look skyward, where everywhere we saw perfect ones, but only at the top of towering firs.
We hatched a plan. We’d chop down a very tall one and, after we felled it, lop off its top.
While it took a few tries and we acknowledged Dad would disapprove when he visited the woods in the spring and saw the carnage, we counted our efforts a success.
We loaded the tree onto the toboggan and emerged from the woods, confident it would be the best tree our house had ever seen.
And sure enough, once perched in the corner, all lit up with Christmas lights, it was the most exquisite thing in the world.
Amy Calder has been a Morning Sentinel reporter 33 years. Her columns appear here Saturdays. She may be reached at acalder@centralmaine.com. For previous Reporting Aside columns, go to centralmaine.com.
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