Tannenbaum Trauma

By Kate Gostick

Long before the dawn of Christianity, people have brightened up the Winter months by hanging evergreen branches above their doors to ward off witches and evil spirits during the long, dark nights.

For the Druids the boughs symbolised everlasting life, and the Vikings believed evergreens were the plant of the sun god, Balder. In ancient Rome, Saturnalia, a midDecember feast in honour of the God of Agriculture, Saturn, was marked by evergreens in homes and temples to symbolise the anticipated fruitfulness and greenery of the fields, orchards and olive groves. In Germany, in the 16th century, Christians brought decorated trees into their homes around Christmas time. From as early as 1747, German settlers in Pennsylvania erected Christmas trees first in their community spaces and then in their individual homes, but the trees were rejected by the wider population who saw them as “pagan mockery”. Queen Victoria’s German husband, Prince Albert, brought the idea of a decorated tree to England. In 1846, when the couple was portrayed in a sketch standing next to a Christmas with their children, decorated trees became the must-have item in any fashionable Victorian home.

Christmas trees have always brought with them conflict in our house. Neither my husband nor I had grown up with a real tree. We had a plastic tree whose branches needed to be inserted into the two-piece brown plastic trunk sat in a three-pronged stand. Each year, from the year I was born, when my grandparents had brought the tree for me, a plastic twig would become detached, and we would search for the stub in order to reattached it. My dad would then disappear into the shed to fix the lights and return moments later with a twinkling string to bring the plastic tree to life. Dominic’s dad also had broken lights to repair every year, but he was not so technically proficient with electrical items as my dad, so Dominic recalls yearly stress and argument as their golden tinsel tree was erected and attempts made to illuminate it.

When it was time for us to get our own tree, we had decided to go for the real tree option. Before moving to America, we would head off to Delemere Forest some time in the first two weeks of December. Dominic would pull out a tree from the pre-cut specimens leaning against the wooden fence and hold it up for my approval. A shake of the head would signal to him that this was not “the one” and he would then pull out a succession of trees before I came to the conclusion that the first tree he had pulled out was actually the perfect tree. We would then head off into a hut to meet a man from the Rotary Club wearing a white nylon beard and a red suit. It was here that my children discovered that Santa’s real name was Dave, as a well-meaning elf popped her head around the door of the hut to ask Father Christmas a very important question. “Do you want a brew Dave?” she yelled. “Lovely Sheila. I’m parched,” replied Santa adjusting his nylon beard and asking James, who was sitting on his knee, what he wanted Father Christmas to bring him this year.

When we moved to America, Santa was only to be found in the Shopping Malls, and tree buying became an experience of its own. Families in America usually purchased their trees the last weekend of November when the passing of Thanksgiving heralded the start of the “Holiday Season” and Fall decorations were exchanged for Christmas ones. Dominic loved to go to Trombetta’s ice cream and garden centre, where you would select a precut tree and then sit and eat ice cream whilst the tree was strapped securely to the top of the car by Mr Trombetta. As soon as you had lapped up the scraps of black raspberry, chocolate or coffee from the bottom of the enormous paper tub with the festive red plastic spoon and maybe bought a poinsettia or two, it was all ready for you to drive off hassle-free. I, on the other hand, preferred the long drive to a tree farm in Grafton, where you were given a large tarp and a saw and pointed in the direction of the field full of trees in the distance. You would then march off through the snow to choose the perfect tree. After much discussion, the tree was selected. Dominic would lie on the frosty, wet ground to saw away at the trunk, snow falling in clumps on his back from the long branches of the fattest tree in the field until it fell. He would lift it onto the tarp and drag it back to the car through the snow, which would rise up over the top of his boots and melt against his skin before dripping down into his socks. He would then attempt to lift the wet spiky branches onto the

top of the car before strapping it on with string, whilst the boys and I went into a warm hut for hot cider and cookies and to pay. To me, this was a much more romantic way to begin the celebrations, but for some reason, it was less appealing to Dominic, so we would alternate between the tree farm and Trombetta’s until we went to Germany and everything changed.

German parents decorate their Tannenbaum in secret with candles, tinsel and traditional ornaments on Christmas Eve, and the tree is revealed to the children with their gifts nestled under its branches with snacks of cookies and nuts. For German children, Saint Nicholas has already filled their shoes with sweets and chocolate and left his gifts on his special day, December 5th. The protestant reformer Martin Luther started the tradition of adding lighted candles to decorate the tree in an attempt to recapture the brilliance of a starry Christmas sky. This addition of naked flames meant that Germans would not buy trees until the few days before Christmas to make sure the needles remained fresh and giant pines did not ignite in their living rooms into a festive fireball. We would travel to England a few days before Christmas, so we needed a tree much earlier in the season than they were available in the shops. However, friends who had lived in Germany for several years before us assured us that they knew of a tree farm a little way south of Frankfurt where you could cut down your own tree from the start of December. In our first year in Germany, we all set off in a huge ex-pat convoy down the motorway on the first weekend of December. The friends had told us it was a bit of a drive, but we had not expected two hours at lightning German autobahn speeds. It felt like we were almost in Austria when we saw the sign for the farm. Everyone bundled out of their cars and headed for the little hut where a man pointed us towards what seemed more like a cliff face than a field of trees. Clinging on the side of the rocky slope were the saddest collection of trees you had ever seen. Each one of them had received no light from behind, where the land rose sharply, blocking out the sun. The only light came from across the valley and meant that the trees had one beautiful bushy side and one totally bald side. We all scrambled up the bank clinging onto the grass to prevent ourselves from slipping back down towards the car park. We found the least twig-like tree that we could, that had a small area with some semblance of greenery and life clinging to its branches, and Dominic attempted to saw through the trunk. Since the ground rose up sharply behind the trunk, this was not an easy task as the saw banged against the rocky slope. This was a piece of cake in comparison to trying to get the tree safely down the vertical path towards the hut to pay.

Eventually, Dominic managed to wrestle the tree down, spending as much of the descent on his bum as his feet. He strapped it to the car, and I went to pay. I did not dare to tell him the cost. As the only tree farm, it seemed in the whole of Germany, supplying crazy foreigners who wanted trees weeks before the big day, the owners were more than aware that they were a monopoly that could charge a premium. Suddenly, even the Grafton tree farm seemed appealing to Dominic, and the journey back along the autobahn only added to this appeal. If the journey there had taken two hours travelling at 90 miles an hour, the journey back with a halfdead skeleton of a tree strapped to the roof was to take much, much longer. Even I failed to see the romance of the experience, as we positioned the tree in the corner of the living room so that there were two walls to hide its lack of foliage. The following year we bought a plastic tree that we continued to use back in America. I always wanted a tree with coordinated decorations and beads, but the rest of the family preferred tinsel and a hotchpotch of decorations collected from our travels and made in preschool classrooms. Thus, the plastic tree became the home to tinsel, baubles with pictures of European cities, reindeers made of tiny handprints and two lollypop sticks framing photos of three-yearolds in Santa hats.

When we returned from Germany, Dominic’s days of watching over the top of his ice-cream cone as a Trombetta tree was strapped to the top of his car were well and truly over. Edward, our middle son, had started work at a tree farm in Southborough. The elderly couple, who owned it, had been looking for a new boy scout to help them out there as the old one had gone off to university. Edward became an apprentice tree farmer, which meant that there was an expectation that we would buy our tree from the farm, and Dominic’s days of ice cream with tree shopping were well and truly over!