The Crazy Christmas Tree 12-18-17

MORE OLD TIMEY STUFF

The Crazy Christmas Tree - excerpt from my book 12-18-17

We moved off of the old farm when I was nine, I had to say goodbye to all my favorite places including my deserted island. I would see it all one final time when I was older in my 50's.

We started living in town so my mother could work as my stepfather was mostly bed ridden those days and there was little community help yet. I had thought us poor on the farm, but now began a time of really living poor, sometimes barely enough to make a good supper for the 3 of us. Instead of fond memories, the memories of plenty on the farm now seemed like a bitter mockery. We lived in a tenement.. a cheap rental with 2 rooms downstairs and 2 bedrooms up, and that year I entered 5th grade. I was not liked in school.. I was the stranger, the misfit, in raggedy clothing and a conspicuous choppy home haircut. I couldn't play ball or do the other things.. I had never grown up with them. Instead I had a dog, a gun, an island and an old horse.

December arrived and the small town was decorated with lights and all seemed bright and gay, except at our house, where there was not even a wreath. Most kids brought a sack lunch and those close by went home for lunch.. I did too, but not to eat. I went home to not have to let on I had no sack lunch.. or lunch at all. The three of us would eat a single meal together around 4 o'clock.

I walked back to school and there was a commotion. A tree had arrived for our classroom and the janitor was cutting it in half. It was maybe 18 feet tall and too tall for the classroom ceiling. They dragged the 7 usable feet inside and a bunch of merry kids started draping paper chains and other things on it while I looked on gloomily from the rear of the room. At 3:30 I asked my teacher Mrs. Donna whether I might have the bottom part outside.. making the excuse our family could use it for heat and she cheerily nodded. I started dragging the heavy tree bottom back to our tenement about 3/4 of a mile away. The bottom of a tree is the heavier part and this was a big part so I was totally worn out by the time I got home.

My mother gave it a strange look when she got home, but being the make-do type, she took charge and we got the tree bottom inside the living room. It occupied a large corner and stuck our far into the room, so tall the upper branches pressed against the ceiling. Actually it was an illusion.. it seemed to extend upward through an imaginary hole into a realm above! My mother had one box of ornaments in the closet and I made paper chains like we did in school and we strung popcorn, and all the while my mother hummed Christmas carols.

"That is the craziest tree I ever saw!" remarked my stepfather. "It seems to just keep on going, up and up, to who knows where!"

"It goes to heaven!" remarked my mother softly, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. "It is a heavenly tree!". It did sort of reach up.. and it changed the atmosphere in our house! there was Christmas cheer now, like previous years, and we were all busy making homemade gifts like the old days. Even the cat was happy in a nest she had made herself in the hollow of the highest branches of the tree just below the ceiling. "A crazy cat in a crazy tree ", remarked my stepfather shaking his head.

We exchanged gifts in school and I drew the name of a boy I liked who was kind to me. With some money I had earned shoveling snow, I bought a "Tiny-Tot stapler kit that came in its own plastic case. I made a mental note that it was easier to buy something for a boy. A girl might read more into the gift and think something romantic! Holidays were busy and my mother had plenty of work and things were a little happier among us. There was the aroma of baking cookies.

Music was a big thing at home. My mother played the piano by ear, and would make jokes, that was what she used to do, before she learned it was easier to use her fingers! My stepfather played the violin really well also by ear and I strummed an old flat top guitar. Friday and Saturday nights we would sit around and play and sing.

I had a friend "Pokey" who was colored and he and his mom would join us. It was before Martin Luther King days and white people generally did not mix with coloreds at all, but we did. Pokey's mom was a huge woman and her voice was as big and sweet as she was. We sang a lot of hymns and when she sang "Silent Night", goosebumps would run up the back of your neck. People walking by on the street would stop and listen.

Pokey was.. well pokey. He walked slow and talked slow and even sort of smiled slow. He would look at me kind of funny and say "You is the funniest white boy I eva did see!" and double up laughing at his own joke. He gave me a ball that Christmas, it was slightly used, and I knew it was his very own, Pokey didn't have any money to buy gifts. We still played kick ball together. They were black but not from the south.. they had come from a place called Puerto Rico.. Pokey said "it was d deep south" LOL  Him and his Mom would talk in a funny lingo they called "talking Rican". It would be years before I would know that it was Spanish.

Pokey was destined to die in Vietnam and they sent him home in a big black garbage bag, and white soldiers were joking at the airport, it was a black bag for a black kid. People still didn't mix colored and whites, but our family played for the funeral. Mother on the piano and Stepdad on the 'fiddle' and me with the old flat top, in the black church, the only whites there. We played the things Pokey liked on those Friday nights, and at last his Mother sang the song he liked to hear her sing.

There is a name I love to hear

I love to sing its worth

It sounds like music in my ear

The sweetest name on earth

Oh, how I love Jesus......

That year was a special Christmas after all, We were still kids and still had dreams and times of fun, and poor or not just didn't seem that important; But the thing that really made it Christmas that year was That Crazy Tree! It really did seem to reach way up to heaven!

© Copyright 2018 by Daniel Blankley. All rights reserved.

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