Christmas Trees!

CHRISTMAS TREES!

I was talking to a friend yesterday about putting up Christmas decorations.  She was complaining about the time involved in the whole process. She talked about how hard it was putting the artificial tree together and then dragging the boxes of lights and ornaments out of the attic and then trying to track down the little statues of Santa and Mrs. Claus that she thought she had put in the basement but hadn’t.   My friend said that the whole operation took about 5 hours, even with her husband helping her put the Christmas lights on the bushes outside the house. 

5 hours to decorate the house for Christmas?  Is that all?

Let me tell you what it was like when I was a kid growing up in the fifties in the Polish neighborhood just east of Humboldt Park.    

The biggest problem was finding a tree.  It wasn’t like you could go down to Adolf and Rosita’s Grocery on the corner and buy a tree.  Trees were sold in weird places that you wouldn’t expect to be selling trees.  

Let me give you one example.  Taverns.

For some reason, taverns in the area sold trees.  They would have a dozen or so trees leaning against their front windows. Picking out a tree at a tavern sounds easy.  But it wasn’t.  A lot of times these trees were ragged with broken branches or needles that were turning brown.  What you had to do then was find another bar and another bar and another bar until you found one with a perfect tree.

My parents were picky when it came to trees.  They had both grown up near forests in rural Poland, and they knew a great tree when they saw one.  So when they checked out the trees at these taverns, they knew what they were looking for.  They were looking for the  best Christmas tree in Chicago.

What made this search especially difficult was the fact that my parents didn’t own a car.  We would, therefore, have to walk from tavern to tavern.  We’d walk from a tavern on the corner of California and Division to one on the corner of Western and North Ave to one on the corner of Kedzie and Armitage.  And of course, what made this search for the perfect Christmas tree even more difficult was the weather.  Once we had found the perfect tree we would often have to carry it home through the falling snow on ice-covered sidewalks.  This whole journey of finding the perfect Christmas tree would often take an entire Saturday afternoon.

And of course, that was just the beginning of the process of decorating our house for the holidays.  I knew that as soon as my dad carried the tree home, he’d drag his hand saw out of the basement and get to work on trimming that tree’s trunk and branches to make it the perfect tree — like the Christmas trees he loved in Poland as a boy before the war. 

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.