Putting Up a Tree

Putting Up a Tree

I had dreamed of having a splendid, sweet-smelling Christmas tree towering over our family living room, spreading an aura of good cheer to all below.

It was our first Christmas in the Pacific Northwest, the year my two sons (then 17 and 14) and I had immigrated to Edmonds from the Philippines. After many Yuletide celebrations spent in the tropics, we’d had our fill of plastic Christmas trees. I was determined to celebrate our first Yuletide season in Washington by purchasing a genuine forest-grown evergreen tree.

The plan, of course, was to have the tree up by December 1st. But I knew something was terribly awry the morning my wall calendar told me that it was already…oops…the 22nd of December.

Only two days before Christmas, and still no tree.

“Get in the car, Sam,” I told my younger boy.

“What for?”

“We’re going to find us an honest-to-goodness, living Christmas tree.”

“You mean a freshly dead Christmas tree,” Sam said, pulling his cap down over his ears in the freezing car.

While driving through Shoreline, we spotted a cluster of Christmas trees in a fruit market that had closed for the winter. The trees stood under the moonlight like a small ragtag army of sentries. I surveyed the candidates. Of the entire bunch, one tree stood out above the rest. “He” was about six feet tall and had a pleasing shape.

“What do you call that one?” I asked the lumberjack who was selling the trees.

“That’s a Wild Douglas fir tree.”

I looked at this tree again, and my heart went THUMP. It couldn’t be helped. It was love at first sight.

“You can have him for ten dollars,” he said.

DEAL! I forked over ten dollars to the lumberjack plus a two-dollar tip for tying the six-foot tree onto the roof of our car.

"Wow, Mom—that was a bargain!" Sam exclaimed as we drove home.

”Always look on the bright side, son. The longer you hold off on those ‘good intentions,’ the closer you get to Christmas Day…and the cheaper the tree.”

My eldest son, Max, met us in the parking lot of our apartment building. The boys managed to haul up “Wild Doug” to our second-floor apartment where they carefully set him down on his side in the balcony.

December 23: Max went to five different stores but couldn’t find a single tree stand. Understandably, all the stands had been sold to customers paying full price for their Christmas trees back in November. And so, that entire day of December 23rd, we watched our verdant Wild Doug gaze back at us from a horizontal position.

On the morning of the 24th, necessity being the mother of invention, and slightly influenced by his screaming mother, Max improvised. He grabbed a long cardboard roll from one of my Costco Christmas wrapping papers, cut the roll into three eight-inch pipes, and glued them into a tripod. Next, he glued his makeshift tripod onto a Santa Claus plastic plate tray that had cost a dollar. He then hoisted Wild Doug up and sank the base of the tree trunk into the tripod. While waiting for the glue to dry, he decorated our Christmas tree with tinsel and ornaments from another tree—that is, the Dollar Tree, a store on Highway 99.

"How’s it going?" I phoned Max from the mall where I was hectically shopping for last-minute presents. "Is the tree up yet?"

"Uh, sort of,” Max answered. “It’s leaning on the wall right now."

"Leaning?’”

"Mom, I had to invent a tree stand,” Max let out an audible sigh. “I'm waiting for the glue to dry before the tree can stand on its own. In the meantime it has to lean on the wall. Okay, Mom?"

"Okay, okay. Did you decorate it?"

"Yes."

"How does it look?"

"Don’t ask me how it looks. Ask Sam."

"Put him on."

Max handed the phone to his younger brother.

"Sam, how does our Christmas tree look?"

"Well, it's sort of leaning like the Tower of Pizza right now."

“You mean the Leaning Tower of Pisa,” I said. “But how does the tree look to you?”

"Mom, if you want to know the truth...it looks like we just converted to Christianity. I mean, do we really know what we’re doing with this tree?”

“I’ll be right there.”

When I burst through the door twenty minutes later, Wild Doug was lying face down on the floor. Max’s homemade cardboard contraption had collapsed, sending Wild Doug crashing down in the middle of our living room, scattering pine needles everywhere.

In desperation, I finally called a friend for advice.

"Go get a bucket and fill it up with rocks," the friend suggested. "Then plunge your tree in the bucket. That ought to hold it upright."

And so, at around six o’clock on Christmas Eve, Max was dispatched into the damp, dark night to gather rocks and stones wherever he could find them on the ground. Meanwhile, I found an old plastic bucket in a closet. Within a couple of hours Max had filled the bucket with rocks and pebbles. He and I anchored the tree down while Sam held the bucket. We swathed the bucket with a red tinsel wrap bought at Hobby Lobby. At midnight, we joyfully opened presents around our happily vertical tree.

And so, kind reader, that is the story of our first Christmas in Edmonds.

Of all the trees in the forest, Wild Doug wasn’t the handsomest, nor was he the tallest. But he sure put up with us. And he sure smelled sweet!

Izabella de la Merced lives in Everett and is originally from the Philippines.

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