Of Christmases Past...

The drive I take to get home from work these days is all surface streets. No highways. I started doing that a while ago, because the highways were always backed up. I probably take a little longer on the streets, but because I'm constantly moving (even at speeds maxing out around 25 mph), it feels better.

The past few weeks I've also been able to enjoy all of the Christmas lights on the drive. You see, I drive through some pretty high-end real estate on the way, and there are some massive -- yet mostly tasteful -- displays of lights. But there are also the less high-end homes with more heart in their lights which make me even happier.

One of the totally random lights that I love to drive past is a small (maybe 4-foot-tall) fiber optic Christmas tree which one house has alongside the driveway. It's the kind of tree that changes colors gradually. I slow down a little while I pass that one each night so that I can watch the blue shift to green and the yellow shift through orange to red.

Last night on my drive, I was looking at that tree (minding the road, of course), and started thinking of the odd variety Christmas "trees" that were around when I was growing up.

My paternal grandmother had a little green ceramic tree that was probably about 18" tall. It was painted to look like it had needles (well, in a "painted on ceramic under the glaze" sort of way), and had small colored glass pegs which were shaped like Christmas lights that went into holes on each of the "branches. There was a small lightbulb inside the base of the tree, and when it was turned on, all of the bulbs -- and the star on top -- would glow. I used to love rearranging the lights, just because.

Slightly stranger -- and, honestly, more vague in my memory -- was a little tree we used to put in the front window of our house when I was growing up. It was a hollow translucent white plastic tree shape, with kind of a glittery finish. I seem to remember that there was one of those rotating colored lights (the kind that had a four-color plastic disk which turned in front of a lightbulb), that we would aim at it. Although, I admit, I may be completely off on that. But I know there was the white plastic tree, at least.

At my dad's drugstore, we always hung decorations up above the aisles at this time of year. Tinsel garlands and, later, the fold-out foil stars and snowflakes. Of course, the front windows were always sprayed with "snow" decorations. Writing backward was a skill we all learned early, thanks to that. (And it probably helped that there's printing in my genes on my mom's side of the family -- a generation or two of people reading type backward and all.) The tree at the drugstore was always a snowy thing with dots for "balls" and snow stripes for garland.

At home we always had a big "live" tree. They figure in in Christmas photos for as long as I can remember. For years in the living room, and then in the family room (after the addition was built on) near the fireplace. The trees sometimes toppled due to cats, so we got good at tying the tree off to secure points (like a planter-hanging hook in the ceiling). A few ornaments bit the dust that way, but there are still boxes and boxes of surviving ornaments which are filled with history and love. To this day, I love to sit in the glow of the Christmas tree lights in the evening and just think about all that has come before.

I think I understand why the Ghost of Christmas Past got the most screen- (or, rather page-, or at least stage-) time in Dickens. After all, the past seems to be where we all spend a lot of time this time of year.