A Christmas Story: Whereupon a great deal of copy is devoted to the discussion of tree stands

"I gotta know what a $5 milkshake tastes like." --Pulp Fiction

By the time our family moved from Original Northwood to Oak Park in the summer of 1981, I was getting ready for the third grade at Lincoln Elementary and would be old enough that first winter (a snowy one) to take an active role in everything Christmas and Christmas trees. 

Those first few years in Chicagoland, we bought our trees from the local YMCA who, for a few weeks, turned their parking lot into a sweetly smelling pine forest. They were your regular parking lot trees and fit just fine into your regular sort of Christmas tree stands. A few years later (and for many years after), our family went to cut down our own tree. My dad grabbed a dulled and slightly rusty hand saw and tossed it in the trunk of our family car, while we, extra thick with winter outwear, all squeezed into the car for the drive to the place everyone thinks of when they think of “the midwest.” Rural Northwestern Illinois. I had no way of knowing at the time, but what started as a simple family outing, would become, to this day, my all-time favorite Christmas tradition.

Once we made it to Williams Tree Farm, still stiff from the long drive, we lumbered out into the cold, protected by layers of waffle-knit long underwear, puffy winter coats, knit caps, and mismatched gloves that always looked a lot warmer than they actually were. Massive work horses, hitched to wagons filled with other families of rugged individualists out to the groves of pine. 

Sure, you COULD walk to find your tree in the nearby rows, but the BEST ones were OBVIOUSLY at the FURTHEST fields. There were Frasers, Canaan and Balsam Firs, White and Scotch Pines, Norway and Colorado Blue Spruces. I had no idea there were so many different kinds of trees. Back then (and frankly, now too) in my mind, there were basically two different kinds of Christmas trees. The soft ones with long needles and floppy branches and the ones good for hanging ornaments.

Surrounded by acres of trees, our family of five now had a VERY IMPORTANT CHOICE TO MAKE. We had to get THE PERFECT CHRISTMAS TREE. And so began the searching and the “arguing.” My mom, ever practical, and (I suspect) quickly tiring of the blasts of chilly midwestern air that sliced right through her layers, usually fell for one of the first trees she saw. I was having none of that. 

“Moooooommm, we just go here, we can’t get that one,” I wailed! And after just a scant few minutes of family togetherness, our crew started to separate in opposite directions searching for THE PERFECT TREE. And then one of us would find it. Look around for confirmation, realize we were alone, then send up a flare to alert the others.

“Hey OVER HERE! I found IT!”

“WHERE?”

“I’m over here!”

“Where?”

“HERE!”

Search and Rescue trained we were not, but eventually the team congregated around one what was, for one (and usually only one) of us, THE PERFECT CHRISTMAS TREE.

“That one?!?!” I exclaimed in disbelief.

“Yeah, it’s so cute,” defended my little sister with the gentle soul who was always drawn to the small, differently proportioned and otherwise odd looking trees.

I always wanted a giant of a tree that would require a step ladder or a sturdy set of shoulders for decoration. Nothing less than 6 or 7 feet would do. My mom always asked the most important question, “Does it SPEAK to you?” That first year she asked the question, I scoffed. What does that even mean? But as the years passed by, we kids embraced the question and asked it of each other. Because if it doesn’t speak to you, it’s not for you.

No matter if it was Susanne’s year to pick a “miniature” pine, or mine to select a towering, iconic spruce, they all had one thing in common. Trunks that were massive and unwieldy to the average Christmas tree stands. 

Farm-fresh trees demanded something more robust and the farm had them (conveniently) for sale, but my mom, raised by frugal depression-era Germans, had complete and utter confidence that my dad—a somewhat more impulsive man raised in a brownstone in Brooklyn by Italian immigrants—would figure something out.

It turned out that that “something” involved a 5-gallon steel bucket normally reserved for car washing duty, wood scraps, a square slab of particle board and rope. Lots of rope. He wasn’t a carpenter or designer, or longshoreman, but he had tools and motivation, and sometimes that was enough.

The next day after our first visit to the farm, construction began. 2x4s hammered into that engineered-wood base, stacked, rising, forming a kind of frame that was perfectly sized to hug the sides of the steel bucket. Because who doesn’t keep their Christmas tree in a steel bucket?

My dad's design was massive and unwieldy and could, if called for, withstand the gale forces of The Windy City. An impossibly beautiful convergence of contradictory and incomplete ideas. It was somehow both over-built and under-engineered. The framing and stance of the stand was indestructible. And yet the gapingly wide mouth of the bucket, alone, would never keep a tree standing tall.

Securing the tree required imagination, improvisation and a lot of rope. Those early years of the stand, my dad was responsible for the lashing of yards of white cotton ropes first around the bottom branches of the tree, then tying them to various parts of the sturdy frame of the stand. My job was to hang onto the tree with this all going on.

“Okay, I think it’s good. Let it go,” my dad called from down below.

The tree invariably began to fall and I would grab hold and pull it right again.

This is a process that would be oft repeated with more layers of rope and knots and eventually, often an hour later, (and one year, the assistance of nearby furniture), the tree would stand tall.

In later years, as my half-hitch knot-tying skills improved, my father sent me underneath the pine canopy to secure the tree. My younger sister took on the role of tree-holder-upper. Ultimately selecting our tree, putting it up and decorating it was fully and always a 3-day endeavor.

40 years later, I'm the dad and I married into a much more efficient kind of tree stand. And for the honeymoon phase and a few years beyond it was a solid, if also imperfect stand. While no rope festooned with complicated knots, or sophisticated lashing techniques was required, the process still called for three of us to secure even our “parking lot” trees in the stand.

Up top, I reprised my roll as tree-holder-upper, jabbing my arm deep through prickly branches covered in still-soft needles (this is a markedly less pleasant task at the end of a tree’s stay in our living room when supple sweetly smelling needles have dried into hard and sharp daggers), to grab the trunk. My boy Peter, just old enough to turn 4 bracing screws and small enough to sneak under the lower canopy of branches would advance the long bolts. With each turn of the screw, the bolts inched closer to piercing the woody-flesh of the already dying scepter of the season of St. Nick. We dress it up in lights, but underneath it’s all very medieval. 

“Is it straight?” I shout to our third, standing purposefully at a distance so as to better judge. “How about NOW?!” “What about NOW!?” 

When my wife Sarah gives us the go-ahead, I bark out commands to the small person tucked in below. 

“No, RIGHTY-tighty. Not that screw, the other one….no the OTHER one!” 

Eventually, it all comes together. The tree stands alone. We’re only a little worn out, fingers dirty with sticky sap and dead pine needles. This was, for some time, one of my young family’s yearly Christmas holiday rituals and despite it all, it worked pretty well for us. 

Then about 3 years ago, our venerable stand, the one that was a decided upgrade from my father’s woodworking marvel, developed a massive leak! I mistakenly thought, “wow, this tree sure is thirsty” when I noticed an empty bowl the day after it was set up. Then I noticed a soaking wet blanket fortuitously placed below the cold metal legs of the stand. Because I am my mother’s son, (myself a half-frugal German), I used a few pieces of strategically-placed duct tape to fix the leak.

Honestly, the fix worked surprisingly well in the category of “keeping water from pouring through the ceiling of our downstairs neighbors” department. Unfortunately, now that the center spike meant to help secure the tree was gone, it took little more than a passing breeze or errant thought to send our tree—fully decorated—crashing to the ground sending ornaments and pets flying across the floor. 

And no matter how much deeper we sent the bolts into the trunk to find more secure purchase, the tree became more unstable with each subsequent fall. Eventually it just got to the point where I just shoved it backwards into a corner to keep if from crashing forward. We all got used to viewing a tree that was at a 60 degree angle.

This Christmas it would have been so 2020 to simply let out a sigh, shrug our shoulders and set up our somewhat functional duct-taped tree stand again this year. But every now and again the impulsive Italian side of me makes a quick decision. Now don’t get me wrong, I did read at least one article titled, “Best Christmas Tree Stands” first. But when Sarah found that the editors of Wirecutter recommended a German-designed model awkwardly (and somewhat suggestively) called the Krinner Tree Genie XXL, I announced aloud, “BUY IT!”

It’s absurdly expensive and yet is already in the running to be one of our more favorite purchases. It nicely balances efficient modern design with the appropriate level of medieval simplicity. Its clenched jaws snap open with the racket of a bear trap and ratchet closed with only slightly less ferocity using the power of a gear actuated foot crank. Click-click-click-cliiiick-click-cliiiiiick-Clickety-clack-cliiiiick—creak, click. GOTCHYA! The mighty green base even includes a water-level gauge that allows me to track how much the tree drinks daily. DATA! Crucially, without too much effort, a single, solitary person could set up a tree using this stand in under 5 minutes. UNDER 5 MINUTES!

If I’m honest, part of me really does miss my father’s homemade stand and the 3 days it took to get our tree set up. But the precision and ease of this new tech? It might just be a Christmas miracle.

Fortunately for me and all the traditions that actually matter, it still took three of us to get the tree up. 

“Hey, Peter, how does this thing work? Where are the instructions?”

Too small…I can’t read those. 

“Can you read them to me? Now…yeah okay, now go under there, I’ll hold the tree up, make sure the spike is in the center of the trunk…SAAAARAAAHH, come in here for a second…IS IT STRAIGHT?!”