A Christmas Treasure: Gone But Not Forgotten (December 12, 2005)

Helen & George (December 1980) To the left is Nola's favorite Christmas tree from Harry & David's.

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My husband, family and friends refer to me as the Christmas Looney. The name fits. At one time, I had sixty-five Christmas trees proudly displayed in our home year-round. My obsession with Christmas trees began when I celebrated my fifth Christmas.

My Aunt Nora sent us a very special gift for Christmas in 1948.  She selected it for our family with love from Harry and David’s in Oregon.  It was an eighteen-inch artificial tree like no other I had seen before or since.

The tree arrived in a box with its branches pressed up to the trunk.  I remember gently pulling each of the tiny branches out from the center of the tree.  Each branch was soft like a baby chick’s downy feathers.  It was a beautiful shade of Christmas green, and it had a real wooden trunk with beautiful bark.  Inside the tree’s box, we also found twenty miniature packages, all wrapped in multicolor paper.  Each package had its own real ribbon bow.  Inside the tiny packages were fruits and nuts, carefully selected by the folks I referred to as the Harry and David Elves.

I remember my mother let me arrange the tiny tree on top of our dining room buffet.  I was allowed to stand on one of the dinning room chairs.  There was a large mirror on the back of the buffet, which reflected the beautiful tree.  I was given the honor of arranging the packages.  I attached the tiny ones to the little branches; the larger packages I placed around the tree’s trunk.

In my eyes it was a magical tree.  It looked like a tiny but real tree, picked from a magical Christmas forest.  It needed no lights because the branches came to life in the light of the dining room, reflecting off the bright shiny packages.  On each of the twenty days before Christmas, we opened one of the little gifts and enjoyed the treasured fruits and nuts inside.

I was given the privilege every Christmas of carefully bringing that little tree out of its storage box and back to life on the buffet.  When the tree was up and decorated, the magic of Christmas began.

I left home to attend nursing school at the University of San Francisco in 1961.  My folks waited for my return at Christmas break to let me set up the little magical tree. I married between my junior and senior years and remained in San Francisco for another five years.  Every December I would return to Davis with my husband and our growing family to celebrate Christmas with my folks and my brother.  I was still given the honor of setting up my magical tree.

In 1969, my husband was accepted into a Ph.D. program at UC Davis, and we moved back to Davis.  The first Christmas after my mother died, my dad gave me the little tree.

Each year my Christmas collection seemed to grow.  By 1979, it was enormous; because it took so much time to get out and put away, we decided to leave it up year round.  The little magical tree had a place of honor on the living room piano.

The little tree remained there until 1996, when our house burned to the ground.  It was one of the few possessions we lost that I really missed.  I have searched every Christmas since then for a replacement.  This past fall, while traveling in Oregon, we stopped at Harry and David’s in Medford and took the factory tour.  Alas, no one there remembered those particular little trees.

I may never find a tree to replace that special little tree, but it will always remain in my heart and my mind as a special, magical Christmas memory.