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One of the neighbor's children come to interview me for a school
project. (Gosh, made me really feel old.) He wanted to know how we
decorated our Christmas trees in the "olden days". I told him how we
would take and string popcorn and cranberries and drape over the tree
and color strips of paper and make chains to put on it. I also told
him about the bubble lights or that's what I called them. (He was
facinated by these.) I didn't have the heart to tell him that at one
point we had a silver tree with the colored strobe light behind it. I
think it would have disappointed him as much as it had me. This got
me thinking about how other people in the region decorated their
trees
Please post other ways of decorating Christmas trees so I can
pass them along to Josh |
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What I remember more than the "what" of decorating --we did the same
things you describe-- is the "how," because I had a world class mother
who insisted her children would have the happiest Christmases possible.
Mostly a stay-at-home-mom when I was young (though when my brother and
I were gone from the roost she went back to school for a nursing
degree), every September she'd hunt up some menial job available to a
woman with an eighth grade education. Sometimes she was a motel maid,
cleaning up other people's messes for minimum wage. Two years she made
fifty cents over minimum working in a factory where they made
bedsprings. I don't know what she did in that place, but when we went
with my father after school to fetch her home from work Mom's hands
would be so lacerated and aching she couldn't close them. Several years
she worked in a tomato-canning facility, eight to ten hours a day in a
reeking nasty noisy place where the temperature was always above a
hundred degrees...
She always quit the day before Thanksgiving, and every dime earned in
the course of those dreadful hours went toward Christmas. I can't qualify for doing anything in the "olden days" but I once
heard a story from one of my aunt's about how they used to
decorate their tree "up in the old holler". My uncle was a fairly
simple man, farm born and raised, who always shunned the
fancy stuff. When my cousins were young, they didn't have
a lot of money and they decorated with popcorn strings and
paper chains and made little ornaments out of construction paper
and tin foil and cookies. They saved the wrapping paper from
year to year and used this for decoration creations also. One year
my oldest cousin carved a bunch of little ornaments and his
younger sister decorated them with whatever she could find.
I never experienced their "homemade" trees, but they sound
beautiful to me. |
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