A Christmas Memory: Charlie Brown had nothing on the Adair boys

By Rufus Adair

I can’t say this tale stands out as my favorite Christmas memory, but it does stand as the one with the sharpest details.

The story starts on a Saturday morning in early December back in the early 1950s – I’m guessing 1953 or ’54, when I would have been 9 or 10 years old; my brother, 5 or 6.

It was also a time when Christmas tree lots were few and far between, and fold-up aluminum-and-plastic trees lay way off in the future. If you wanted a Christmas tree, you went out to a patch of beat-up land, often an abandoned farm. The South was full of such places in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

Such places were where Mother Nature’s first volunteers usually were loblolly pines. People called them old-field pines. They typically sported long, sprongy branches growing every whichaway as they fought to find sunlight. Most of their six-inch needles clustered at the branch tips. One does not hear words like “lush” and “symmetrical” associated with loblollies.

My father usually led our annual all-male expeditions to find a proper Christmas tree, but this particular year he had not yet returned from a business trip. Meanwhile, our mother had set Saturday for finding a tree, getting it back to the house, getting it up, and getting it decorated. Before dark. She handed us Daddy’s saw and said, “You are big boys now. Find us a nice one.”

And with that bit of encouragement, we headed off to a nearby spot where our tree expeditions had found success the past two or three years. It was good to have my little brother Robin along for company. However, other than carrying the saw back home, he was pretty much useless, especially if we ran into the neighborhood bully – or a horde of squirrels.

The problem we found was that trees that had been six or seven feet tall in 1950 had done what trees do. They grew. We had trouble finding a tree our size but finally found a couple and chose what we thought was the best one to cut and drag back to the house. There we dug out last year’s tree stand Daddy had made into an “X” from a couple of scrap pieces of 1x4s. We re-nailed it to the tree and tugged the whole thing to the usual place of honor.

Unfortunately, that place of honor sat the tree in front of a large window. We hadn’t counted on the large amount of light it focused on the tree and its conspicuous, and many, foliage gaps. However, for a couple of boys, the solution was simple: go back out and cut some more branches from other trees. The handyman’s best friend – duct tape – did the rest. ECPC, we thought.

The strapped-in branches even filled in a couple of the gaps. Well, kinda-sorta. They did tend to droop a bit at odd angles. And a couple of places remained where you could have shot a basketball through and not caused a breeze, much less damage.

Thus our tree began its morphing into the Wounded Warrior of Christmas trees. My brother and I proudly called Mama in for an inspection of our manly efforts. She said nothing. We took her silence as approval.

We should have waited for a verbal attaboy. This time, the wily lady stayed in the room.

The first hurdle came with the strings of lights. “No, no, no. You have to test them first.” Those early 1950s strings meant that one faulty bulb led to the whole string going blank.

“No, no, no. Don’t put two blues next to each other.” At least the process didn’t involve a scrap over round-and-round versus in-and-out. (That lesson would come later in one of the boy’s lives.)

Next up, ornaments. In the Forties and early Fifties, ornaments leaned heavily toward clear glass bulbs with a couple of painted stripes. Both the tree and the boys survived, even with teetering stools and questionable aesthetics. Mama, she lay low.

Finally – finally – the piece de resistance. It’s the tinsel, another relic from the early Fifties. Apparently the main idea behind draping narrow, foot-long strips of wrinkled-y tinfoil all over the tree was to create the illusion of sparkling icicles. However, the mess we made was no illusion.

Our box of tinsel could itself have stood as a modest monument to the frugal habits borne of scraping through two decades of the Thirties’ Great Depression and the Forties’ World War II. Mama had carefully saved the tinsel from Christmas trees past. The result was a box of scraps and tangled wads at least the size of baseballs.

It was then when my little brother found his niche. With perhaps a little too much glee, he began hurling the wads into the topmost part of our tree. Mama broke her silence. “No, no, no,” she said, following it up with a dreaded second “no, no, no. One strand at a time.” Our sweet mama meant business this time, but it just translated into her taking over the salvage operation.

Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” comic strip would soon thereafter make “Charlie Brown tree” a household expression for dopey boys and bumbling disasters. Personally, I suspect Schulz just might have been watching through the window that day. Charlie Brown had nothing on the Adair boys.

Contributed by: Rufus Adair

Board Member and Docent of Old School History Museum

Retired Newspaper Reporter and Teacher