HUMOR
O
No, Christmas Tree
ONE MAN'S LIFELONG STRUGGLE TO AVERT YET
ANOTHER LIVING ROOM DISASTER
By Terry Sullivan. Terry Sullivan is a frequent contributor to the Magazine
but never learned welding
Published December 5, 2004
I haven't any idea about trees falling in forests, but I can tell you firsthand
that when a 9-foot Christmas tree falls in a living room, amazingly nobody
hears it.
On either occasion.
Happened the first time in my childhood, at my maternal grandmother's house.
Understand that this was a German grandmother, with the genetic need for a tree
that wouldn't be ashamed to stand in the lobby of a medium-sized hotel. Only
the ceiling height stopped her, and until I was 10 I didn't know Christmas
trees came to a point-all of ours had been seriously lopped off to fit the
room.
Imagine a giant bush in a corner, hanging over half of the furniture. The same
German needs required that the lead tinsel (now sadly banned, probably because
we kept chewing it as children) be hung one strand at a time, and carefully
pinched over the branch so the ends didn't show, until great sheets of it bent
the branches. And that certain of the ancestral ornaments be hung in their
traditional places, and, most important of all, that the wires for the
lights-lovely, tiny yellow lights, made to illuminate telephone switchboard
lines, that my grandfather had brought home from the Western Electric plant
where he worked-be snaked invisibly along the branches.
The day of the trimming was also the day of my grandparents' traditional annual
holiday fight-about the unacceptably visible wires, or tinsel that wasn't
hanging as straight as a Marine colonel's spine, or a pickle ornament my
grandfather had placed where the glass tomato was supposed to hang. My
grandfather was a Swede from
And yes, there was a pickle ornament-and a carrot, and an ear of corn and the
above-mentioned tomato. Lots of foodstuffs, although there was no fruit,
All of which is how my father, the son-in-law in this case, came to create The
World's Best Christmas Tree Stand. He no doubt was interested in calming his
mother-in-law, getting his father-in-law off the hook and preventing future
Christmas tragedies, but he was also a man who liked a challenge. And he was a
machinist.
So he went off to work, where he borrowed some spare steel from the Illinois
Central Railroad, much like my grandfather had borrowed those switchboard
lights. He delivered a 20-inch-square, 3/8-inch-thick steel plate with a piece
of 7-inch-diameter iron pipe, about 10 inches tall, welded to it. The thing
weighed maybe 75 pounds and he painted it a festive silver.
After he brought it to my grandmother's, he took a slightly smaller piece of
pipe and drove it onto the tree base with an 8-pound maul, then telescoped the
tree-holding pipe into the one welded to the plate and inserted four bolts into
the threaded holes he'd tapped around the top of the pipe. These were
completely unnecessary, of course, but he was making sure. He'd made the stand
while he was supposed to be working on the railroad, and his goal was clearly
to fashion something you could drive a freight train into without fear.
I didn't think much about all of this until I was married, with giant trees of
my own. (I'd inherited the need for a Marshall Field's-sized display, if not
quite the fuss-budgety ornament-placement gene.)
We would carefully decorate the tree's boughs to the delight of our smiling
children, hanging vegetation and fauna ("Ornta-ments!"
my youngest would croon) and trying to hide the wires on the lights. I use
clear bulbs and a rheostat dialed down low in an
attempt to replicate the small glow of those switchboard lights. (It's a
genetic thing.) And no tinsel, because my family has rejected the plastic stuff
as unwilling to hang perfectly straight, the way Gott
intended. I've added 150 feet of (fake) pearls instead, and, while they are
horizontal and violate the verticality rule, I like to think my grandmother
would approve. The result is stunning, if I do say so myself.
Or it was until the fateful morning we got up and found the tree, ornta-ments and all, fallen to its death, scattering my
inherited glass pickle, carrot and violin to the carpet. Which is when I
remembered that the holiday season after my grandparents passed away, perhaps
to festoon some tannenbaum in the sky, my sister (who
has lower ceilings than I do, by the way) had quietly laid claim to the World's
Best Christmas Tree Stand.
I spent the next couple of dozen years buying a series of failed tree stands.
They were made of cheap, punched-out sheet metal. They bent. They wobbled. They
required six months' worth of magazines under one leg to present a straight
tree, the application of which itself once resulted in a fallen free before the
pickle had even been hung. (And there's a phrase I'll bet you've never read
before.)
I considered doing what the guys at Daley Plaza do with the Mayor's giant
tree-guy wires attached to stakes-but my wife drew the line at my driving
spikes into the living room floor. In the end I wired the treetops to door
frames and walls with picture-hanging materials. But instead of dreaming of
sugarplums, I would sleep restlessly, knowing that somewhere my grandmother was
telling my father that she could see the wires, and that his stand was much
better.
And then a couple of years ago some other Germans came to my rescue. Who else
would care enough about monster Christmas trees to bother? I found the Krinner Christmas Tree Genie for sale at Poor Bob's, my
local tree lot in
Big, flat bottom, wider than the one my dad made. In the center
are five impressive jaws, connected by a circular steel cable. You stick the
tree in the middle-it takes ones up to 7 inches in diameter-impaling it on a
small spike to hold it steady, and pump a foot pedal while the jaws close in
around the base of the tree, automatically adjusting to bumps and knots and
just as automatically, even magically, straightening the tree.
You not only don't have to crawl on your stomach to adjust it with magazines
while pine needles fall down your collar, you can do it with one hand. (And one
foot.) Pour a gallon and a half of water into the thing and it weighs more than
enough to hold up a nine-footer, even if it is a touch lighter than Dad's.
And on the 12th day of Christmas (or 33d in some households), you just tap the
bottom of the pedal back up and the jaws pop loose. You've got an inquisitive
cat or a 3-year-old? You can lock the pedal in place by sticking a nail or a
small padlock through a hole.
There are other high-end stands out there, but they involve ratchet-driven
cables or even guy wires, and they lack the elegance, and the magic jaws, of
the Bavarian model.
So: a completely unsolicited product endorsement of the Second Best Christmas
Tree Stand in the World, dirt cheap at $69.95. It's available at retail outlets
that sell that sort of thing, including a bunch of tree lots, Equinox on north
Broadway,
And if you happen to own a house with one of those 20-foot cathedral ceilings,
and if you happen to be German and think that a 7-inch-thick trunk and a 9-foot
tree are for sissies, the Bavarians tell me the Krinner
Tree Genie XXL, an even bigger version, is coming next year.
And my sister can keep the tree stand. I got the pickle.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune