Christmas Tree, I Presume

A short memoir of the family Kervinen’s mishaps during the holidays. If your family is anything like mine: crazy, busy with the casseroles and making the plum dessert cream and whether the ham is done and ornaments and secret wrapping sessions in the back, behind the mountain of fresh laundry beside the ironing board, father having some sort of last minute crisis at work so that he immediately has to go take care of it in the morning on Christmas Eve, but everyone knows he’s really going for some last minute gift shopping – every year, in my house! – then you’ll know what I’m talking about.

A few years ago, my dad drove all the way from my home town to pick me up for the holidays with all my Christmas paraphernalia and hiking gear, and after loading the car we quickly headed back East because daylight was burning.

Hitting the motorway, one of us made an idle remark on how they were all over the gas stations now, the seasonal salesmen, selling their trees. We discussed the matter shortly, then, on a whim, decided to buy our tree from one of those gas station vendors and surprise the rest of the family.

We stopped at one such market, eyed the merchandise, decided on a tree, payed for it, and organized it into the car.

After driving for about a half an hour, we sort of noticed a faint smell in the car. Like rust, or Sulphur, or urine. We did our best to ignore it, but by our second hour in the car with our bare Christmas tree we were in agony. And it was clearly coming from the tree. Maybe it had somehow absorbed the variety of smells at the gas station, we tried to reason, who knew how many days it had actually stood there, no matter how fresh the salesman had claimed all of his trees were.

So, arriving at our house, finally, we took deep breaths of fresh country air, and father decided to leave the grossly smelling tree on the porch to air for the rest of the day. The next morning, we hauled it inside. By the time of The Christmas Peace Declaration from Turku at noon, the whole house smelled like an outhouse in the Middle Ages.

I decorated the tree, a clothespin on my nose, one of my best designs by the way, and we hurried the presents underneath the branches from our respective hiding places. The smell only seemed to get worse from the slow acclimation to the warmth inside.

When my sister and I got back from sauna, having been outside for a while to make those snow angels and breathe the sweet nothing of crisp outside air, the compost reek inside was so terrible that our eyes teared up from the sting. “Okay that is it!” my mom cried. “The tree goes.” So, away with the presents, off with the ornaments, out with the tree and its gross piss smell. Father was beside himself. I, as the youngest, immediately whined about not having a tree at all. We ended up sawing a teeny-tiny kitten of a tree from our own yard, and I promptly decorated it with two baubles and a star – that was all that fit. I wish I could add that it also smelled gorgeous, but, sadly, the rank, putrid smell of our Christine of a Christmas tree lingered for several days.

A more Marx Brothers kind of silliness happened many years before our Monster Tree Christmas, when we were once again hauling the tree inside, father and I, the designated son. We fitted the tree into the iron stand, and, arranging it to its corner, realized it was beyond lopsided. It looked like Tim Burton’s Christmas tree. It had almost no branches at all on the other side, and the lopsidedness made it almost tip over. I have no idea why we had such a tree in the first place, the only thing I can think of is that it had been a gift from friends who owned a piece of woods.

Since we were alone in the house, mother had to work that day and my sister hadn’t yet arrived, we put our heads together. “It’s no problem”, we decided, “We can work on this. No problem at all.” Dad produced his tool box, I went to get the drill from the shed. Since the reproduction of branches was delicate work, we had to discretely mark the ones that were placed into the tiny holes so that I wouldn’t accidentally decorate them with anything too heavy. Father drilled a tiny hole in the ceiling, too, and we corrected the lopsidedness with a string that went from the top of the tree to a small screw in the ceiling. The only thing left was to landscape the whole assemble-by-numbers feeling away.

The tree was a good tree, and didn’t give away our secret until The Christmas Day, when one of the artificially fashioned branches finally gave and fell suddenly on the floor, scaring as all to death as we were watching Home Alone in the living room. To this day there is still the tiny screw in the ceiling of our living room, a reminder of the year of the Tool Box Christmas Tree. Father decided to leave it there after taking out the tree that year, just in case.

My third and final story is a short one. It was an extremely cold Christmas, and the radiators were blasting on full force in every house. I came home to celebrate the holidays with a boyfriend, and because we had our own car at that point, father’s roomy Ford that seated eight and then some had been sitting in the cold garage for a few days.

The men went to town to buy the tree in my boyfriend’s car, it was simpler since it was already outside, and it was only after they were back home and getting ready to bring the tree inside that we all realized that the tree stand was in the garage, on one of the shelves behind dad’s huge car. When father shimmied himself into his car and tried the ignition, it didn’t start. It didn’t even sigh.

The garage is, like our house, a small and tight space, not really fitted for today’s big, safe cars, let alone father’s grand taxi of a car that he had back then. Father was a master at getting his big car into the crammed space, he had backed into that garage for thirty years with all kinds of cars. Now, every square inch of the space was taken by the enormous eight-seater. It was as if the garage was the tight envelope, and dad’s car the too bulging a letter inside. To get to the tree stand there would be no other way than to crawl underneath the car to the shelves and back again.

Technically it was my mother who was the smallest person to fit underneath the car, but that wasn’t going to happen. So it was my boyfriend, the one person who was too polite to decline, who ended up under the car.

As he was about to embark on this quest, in dad’s overalls and some work gloves, my friend from the other side of Finland called to wish us a merry Christmas. I took the call in the living room where I had a clear view of the garage and my father grouching beside the car and my boyfriend’s feet sticking from under the Ford. “How are the Grand Preparations going?” she asked, knowing about my family’s routine on Christmas Eve. “Well, it’s your typical Family Christmas from Hell at the Kervinen house. At the moment, N. is under my dad’s car, getting the tree stand.”

I have no idea if this is funny to anyone but me. Every family has their own legends and stories; tokens that stand for the on-going history of a certain unit of people that unravels little by little, anecdotes to be shared either in company, or only relived with the anointed few. We do fight, sometimes, and tell each other to go to hell. But these are some of the stories that always make me love where I’m from.

With these words I wish you a merry Christmas. Stay warm.

P.S. N., thanks again for going under there.