Every year, Christmas reminds me that I am what you might call mechanically challenged.
As the son of a teacher and coach, I spent most of my youth on ballfields and basketball courts, and little time in the garage playing with Dad’s tools.
In fact, we didn’t have a garage, and I’m pretty sure my father had no tools.
Hence the tale of the first Christmas tree.
One year I decided that it was time for my young family to advance to the world of real trees. We headed to the tree lot and found a beauty. The workers strapped it to the top of the car, and away we went. It wasn’t until we got home that I realized the base of the tree was slanted. And it was too wide for the stand I had purchased.
What to do?
A tool guy would go to his garage and fetch a hacksaw.
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I had no saw.
A smart guy would head to the store and buy one.
I’m not that smart.
So I grabbed the sharpest thing I could find in the house, a butcher knife, and started hacking away. I sliced and cut, I cursed and sweated. It was the first opportunity for my children to learn the true meaning of Christmas. Or at least the meaning as expressed by a frustrated young father cursing away his inadequacy and blaming his father for not being a building tradesman.
This week, my oldest son reminded me of this story.
He texted a picture of his Colorado home, fully illuminated for the Christmas season, with lights hanging from the highest gutters. “Got my inner Clark W. Griswold going on this year,†he said.
This is the thing about parenting.
Some things skip a generation.
Both of my older sons can do things with their hands. One was a construction foreman in college.
I don’t know how this happens, but I suppose it’s something about rebelling against your parents.
Take my father. I’ve never heard him utter a swear word once.
But his father? Cursed like a sailor.
Every Christmas Eve, we would go to Granddad’s house and he would start a fire in the basement fireplace for the first time all year. “Open the flue,†my grandmother would yell. Granddad would offer up a few choice words suggesting she should mind her own business.
Eventually, the smoke would start wafting upstairs.
Uncle Tom would suggest I make the sacrificial walk to the basement to remind my grandfather about the flue.
I’d be two steps down the stairs before Granddad unleashed a verbal assault, spitting out the four-letter words like machine gun fire.
Ah, Christmas.
He would take pity on me and hand me a candy cane that had been perched on the Christmas lights above his bar since the previous Christmas, or the one before that. It tasted like cigars, like everything in his house. I enjoyed it anyway, taking pride in my few moments alone with the man who added some colorful phrases to my vocabulary.
Granddad has been gone quite a few years now, but I think of him every Christmas.
It’s that time of year when our traditions dictate that we take stock of our lives, going through the motions on activities that remind us of holidays past.
This week, my family once again made the transition from a fake Christmas tree to a real one. We went to the Boy Scout tree lot on Manchester Road in Ellisville and picked out a beauty.
The kids didn’t fight. The tree fit in the stand. My daughter handed me the garden shears to nip off the top that was scraping the ceiling and the bottom branches sagging on the floor.
There was no cursing. I poured a drink and sat in my chair and thought of Christmases past, of children moved away, of relatives whose time on Earth has passed, and the traditions come and gone that ground us to where we came from and connect to what we’ve become.
The world has changed since the days of the butcher knife and the unopened flue. There have been deaths and divorces. Health scares and graduations. Skills and traditions have been passed down a generation or two. Some have been skipped.
This year, I think, I’ll light a fire on Christmas Eve.
My son can remind me to open the flue.