Christmas Trees and Christmas Lights

Thanksgiving weekend always heralded the official arrival of the Christmas season. There was always an unofficial contest among the neighbors to see who could get their outdoor Christmas lights up the fastest. If my dad hadn't gone hunting, we would string up our outside lights that weekend, and they would stay up until after New Year’s. I remember having the very strong belief that if we didn't have our Christmas lights up, then Santa Claus wouldn't be able to find our house on Christmas Eve!

The outdoor Christmas lights in the early 1960s were not the sophisticated, sparkly twinkle lights that we have now. They were huge old bulbs of green and red, and they got HOT to the touch! They also burned out quite frequently. Daddy would always string ours around the eaves of the house. I can remember him climbing up and down and up and down the ladder, moving it along as he strung the twisted black wires with the big empty sockets, stapling the strands in place with his big blue staple gun. Then would come the fun part!

We had a huge box full of bulbs from the previous year. I got to be his helper and hand them up to him, so therefore I got to establish the "pattern" for the lights each year. It might be green--red--blue--orange--white--yellow, or some variation thereof, but our lights were always multi-colored. Some of the neighbors used all red or all blue or all green lights, but we always used all the colors at our house.

I remember every evening the thrill of plugging in the lights and watching them glow brighter and brighter as darkness fell. You could see the red ones come on right away, even before it got dark. The blue ones were harder to see in the twilight. Thus the nightly ritual of walking around the house every evening after supper, looking for the bulbs that had burned out the night before and replacing them. Sometimes we would run out of a certain color and the pattern would have to be altered a bit, but it was great fun and something I loved to share with my dad.

Another fun tradition was to drive around different neighborhoods in the evenings and look at all the decorated houses with their pretty lights and the decorated trees in the windows. Oh, how I remember those beautiful old Christmas trees! In some ways, they were always the best part of Christmas because they were a tradition that children could fully participate in.

At our house we always had a real tree, a Douglass fir. We would go to the tree lot at Fed Mart’s to buy it. We always bought the biggest one we could find. It would be bound up in netting and the men at the tree lot would have to tie it on top of our car, running the ropes through the open side windows to secure it to the roof. We would drive slowly home with the tree dangling precariously off the rear and the front of the car roof.

When we got home, Daddy would tie it up in the garage. He would hang it by a rope from the rafters, cut the confining net away, and slowly its bound limbs would begin to stretch and fall out gracefully from the trunk. Daddy would trim away however much was necessary from the bottom to make it fit in our house. But then the best part happened! My mom would FLOCK the tree!

You don’t see many flocked Christmas trees anymore, but it was very popular in the 1960s. We always flocked our tree white, to look like snow, but I do remember you could buy flocking in pink or blue or other wild and psychedelic colors. What is flocking, you ask?

Well, as best I recall, it was some sort of white powder that my mom mixed with water in a tub and then it was attached to our vacuum cleaner hose (you had to have a vacuum that would blow OUT) and the whole soggy mess was sprayed onto the tree. I can remember my mom going round and round that tree, fighting with the extension cord and spraying that white goop everywhere. I’ll bet there’s still flocking on the ceiling of that garage to this day!

Anyway, after she had coated the whole tree to her satisfaction, it had to hang there and dry a bit, and then my dad would carry it into the house. Once we had all the lights and ornaments on it, it really was quite beautiful. Just imagine: snow covered boughs in muggy ol’ Houston, Texas. Oh, those real trees always smelled so good! Mama would let me help decorate it. We always put the tree lights on first (again, HOT!), and then the ornaments. Our living room had no carpeting, so there were always a few shattered ornaments, but Mama never fussed at me about it. It was such fun to help her decorate the tree.

At the bottom of our tree, after carefully filling the reservoir of the tree stand with plenty of water so the tree wouldn't dry out, she would wind yards of fluffy cotton batting around the tree stand and the trunk. Then came the sparkly white felt that looked like drifts of snow. And finally came the best part: our lighted Christmas village! Mama had a set of little cardboard houses that all had holes in the backs to allow you to insert a small light bulb through the opening. The little windows were made of yellow cellophane and glowed at night. But you had to be very careful that the hot bulb wasn't touching the window or it would melt! She would always allow me to help arrange our "village" around the base of the tree. There were even miniature pine trees and villagers to complete the set. At one point, she had cut a hole in in the white felt, and she would insert a little mirror underneath it, so that it looked like a frozen pond in the center of the village for skating.

We always sat our tree in front of the living room windows where it could be seen from the street. I always thought we had the prettiest (if a tad unrealistic) tree in the neighborhood.

Our next door neighbors always had a real tree, too, but they always bought a Scotch pine. It was short and squat and thick with sticky, prickly needles. But they ALWAYS completely covered their tree in icicles. Icicles were thin strips of aluminum foil. You could just toss them all over the tree willy-nilly, or you could carefully hang them strand by stand. However you did it, the effect was always the same. Garish. My mom didn’t believe in icicles and would never let us have any on our tree. I guess I can see her point: after she did all that work to flock the darn thing, she didn’t want to cover it up with aluminum foil!

And speaking of aluminum foil, there was another type of unrealistic Christmas tree in the 1960s. My cousins had one. It was a silver aluminum tree with a motorized base that turned it 'round and 'round. That tinsel tree would turn in its motorized base, and as it rotated, colored lights shown up from the bottom of the base and changed it from red to green to yellow to blue. Only in the 1960s! My cousins always hung little Styrofoam balls covered in colored thread as their Christmas ornaments, which did have the advantage of being non-breakable.

Once the outside lights and Christmas trees were finished, our humble little neighborhoods glowed like magical fairy lands. Even though I never experienced a white Christmas in Houston, Texas in all my years there, the Christmas spirit was definitely in the air--whether that air was cold and crisp or warm and muggy made no difference to a child. And after the thrill of our home decorating was done, the next big Christmas adventure loomed upon our horizons: a visit to Santa Claus!