Opinion & Comment

Get Them Christmas Decorations Down!

APPALACHIAN NOTEBOOK - Steve Oden

A mid-January trip took me through the hills of Southeast Ohio and the mountains of West Virginia, through the coal fields of East Kentucky, onto the Cumberland Plateau, and finally down the southern Appalachia foothills of Tennessee and North Alabama. Due to the time of year, mist wreathed the mountainsides. The woods were leafless and stark: stands of hardwood colored in shades of gray and brown, altogether depressing and lifeless. About the only things enlivening the drive were the outdoor Christmas decorations, still glowing brightly almost three weeks after the holiday.

Using rural roads and lesser traveled highways, I passed through parts of five states, but it soon became apparent that many Appalachian families grudgingly let go of Christmas. I suspect some of them leave their decorations up all year long.

Along the route, inflatable snowmen, St. Nicks, and Dr. Zeus Grinch figures still stood sentinel in yards. Twinkling outdoor lights festooned trees and shrubs while, in illuminated nativity scenes, shepherds and wise men maintained their prayerful vigils.

Is there Appalachian etiquette concerning the removal of holiday gewgaws? My parents' Christmas tree always came down on Dec. 26. For decades, ours was a live-cut cedar, sawn on the back 40 acres and dragged to the house, where Dad shaped it with an ax and braced the truck in a No. 10 wash tub.

The fresh tree dried out quickly, even when religiously watered. We dreaded the ordeal of hauling it back outside.

Cedar foliage is scratchy and irritating enough when green. Dried and stiff, the branches cause welts and skin rash. Wrestling a desiccated cedar out of the house made Dad utter un-Christmas-like words under his breath. I will never forget one holiday when we children begged for a giant tree. Dad accomodated us, cutting a 10-footer that sprung the screen door on the way inside. The day after Christmas, the tree was a vegetative monstrosity of rigor mortis. Limbs that had bent to get through the door now stuck out like petrified bones. Dad had to cut the tree up in the parlor with a hatchet and remove it, piece by piece.

After the family tree was "taken down," my brothers and I tied rocks to the trunk and loaded the spindly cedar in a leaky flat bottom boat. We paddled into the pond and sank the skeleton of Christmas Past. In the spring, we'd locate the fish attractor by the telltale pieces of foil and silvery icicles floating to the surface. Many were the fat bluegills and crappie that our old cedar trees produced when we dunked worms over the submerged holiday centerpieces.

In fact, these days when the extended family visits my mother and father, the nephews unlimber fishing poles and head to the pond, now much shallower due to silting. Along the water's edge are the muddy remains of cedar trees, Christmas relics from decades ago when the cousins' parents were wide-eyed children themselves, enraptured with the magic of the season.

Occasionally, someone will get their line hung and, with much excited shouting, drag in an old cedar. I can't help wondering which one of my childhood Christmases has been dredged from the depths, dripping slimy green algae and rotten fishing line. In my mind, the decorated holiday trees were always green and beautiful, the memories shiny and special. It seems unfair to see the same trees, denuded and skeletal, drying on the muddy pond bank.

But, this line of thought also leads me to recollect the soft, sunny afternoons when my brothers, sisters and I flailed the water with our cane poles, squealing and laughing when the sunken Christmas trees gave up new gifts to make a mess of fish for our mother to roll in corn meal and fry for supper.

I am an observer of Old Christmas, a traditional Scotch-Irish celebration that culminates on Jan. 6. However, I was also taught that you pack up the bangles, beads and lights on Dec. 26 in order to look forward the New Year and begin the anticipation of Easter. I guess some Appalachian folks just have a harder time letting go of Christmas, and only a few of them cut live cedars for their holiday centerpieces.

Still fewer people own ponds or lakes in which to sink the trees, nor would most of them go to the trouble. However, this became a treasured post-holiday ritual in our family, and I wish we still did it.

Instead, I dutifully disassemble the artificial spruce, complete with plastic pine cones, in our living room the day after Christmas, pack it inside a cardboard box, and store it in the barn. There it resides for 11 months: reusable year after year. Yes, it is convenient. Yes, it is no mess. . .

But I miss the fanciful day dreams from my younger years - and the anticipation that kept me going during those cold, dreary days of January and February - of our Christmas tree at the bottom of the pond, gently gleaming with finned and scaled "decorations" that we'd fish for in a warmer season.