TIMBERRR

Jon Strickland

It was huge, and surprisingly it was my father’s idea. Every year my family goes together to pick the perfect Christmas tree.

It was Christmas 1997. Typically the tree would be an average six to eight foot tree, but not this year, we had to take advantage of our cathedral ceilings.

When picking out a tree, we picked the largest, tallest tree we could find. It was a gigantic 15 feet, we had to attach red flags to the back of the truck just to get it home.

When we pulled into our drive, our neighbors asked us how many trees we had in the back of the truck.

“That’s just one tree,” my father proudly said.

People had to have been staring at us, watching the five us try to drag this massive tree inside of our house.

When we got it in the house we quickly realized getting the tree up was going to be a challenge.

We had to tie a rope to the top of the tree and pull it up from over the banister, setting it into our rather large tree stand.

Decorating the tree seemed to take an eternity. Normally putting the lights and ornaments on a tree was fun, but this was work.

We used an industrial sized ladder, climbing up and down was like using a nordatrack. We took short breaks in between doing lights, ribbon, and ornaments. The angel had to be placed on from the second story of our house by reaching over the balcony.

It was the largest, brightest Christmas tree I had ever seen inside of a home. Never had our house felt more like Christmas.

That night my dad had decided to sleep on the recliner, directly across the room from the tree. All day long the tree stood tall, glowing with Christmas joy. Around 3 a.m., the tree came crashing down beside my dad, who remained fast asleep.

No one woke up.

The next morning when we came into the living room, there it lay. We froze, staring at the fallen tree with a look of shock upon our faces. My dad was still snoring away.

We broke into laughter, awaking my dad.

“How do you wake up to us laughing but not the tree falling over,” my mother asked.

We continued to laugh until our sides hurt.

We got the tree back up, this time tying it to the banister, and there it stood for the rest of the holiday season.

My family still buys a giant Christmas tree every year. Having years of practice, we have now mastered the art of extra-large Christmas tree decorating.

Christmas would not feel like Christmas without an oversized tree. Having a large tree makes Christmas feel super-sized in our home, and will never fail to help create holiday memories year after year.