I came across an old W.C. Woodall column not long ago about his family’s tradition of going out into the country around Columbus at Christmas time to gather “Christmas greens.” This would have been a long time ago when Mr. Woodall was still a child.

The first item on the trip was to locate a suitable tree, an easy job in those days because all you had to do was stop by some open field on the road and chop down a small cedar or pine. No farmer would object as long as you selected one that was not too large. After the tree was tied to the top of the family car, the Woodalls located a good holly tree and stripped it of some of its branches to take home and put in vases about the house. The last item to be gathered was some Indian holly, what we used to call the Christmas Berry Tree. This was arranged behind portraits and mirrors and no doubt along the mantelpiece above the coal grate fireplace in the Woodall home.

I don’t recommend you try this procedure this Christmas. Most farms were not fenced in olden times and there were plenty of wild places around Columbus where you could find a tree and all the greens you wanted for free. Nowadays you would probably be shot or, at the very least, have to cough up most of your Christmas money to pay the farmer. Still, it was a quaint old tradition and one I wished we had followed more faithfully at our house in Overlook in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

The problem was my mother, Dorothy Winn, or “Dot” as her friends called her. Her appreciation of Christmas traditions fell a little short, in my opinion. For one thing, she was terrible about getting and receiving Christmas presents, especially those intended for my father. He mostly got ties anyway, most of which he never got to wear because, no matter what, mother wouldn’t let him open gifts that came in tie boxes. Instead, she put them up, still in their Christmas wrappings, on a shelf in her closet. The next Christmas she gave them as gifts from herself and dad. She was notorious for giving the same ties back to the people who had given them to my father the Christmas before. As a result, at subsequent Christmases men all over Overlook received ties with cards inside the boxes that read something like, “To Jack, From Mercer. Christmas, 1939.” Or “To Dr.Winn, From Henry, the janitor in the Swift-Kyle Building.”

One of the last things I remember after mother died was cleaning out the closet in her bedroom. Box after box of unopened Christmas presents to my father were stacked on the top shelf.

The truth is that mother never really much liked Christmas. God bless her, she never seemed to really like Christmas trees, either, at least not live ones anyway. One year we had a tree made out of plywood. It was painted white and it had purple and chartreuse balls on it. Lots of purple and chartreuse balls. It looked like something you would see in the window display at Rich’s in Atlanta or maybe at Bloomingdale’s in New York. In those days, nobody in Columbus had a white tree made out of plywood. We did, however. Eight-year-old boys are into normalcy, and somehow it was mortifying to me to have a Christmas tree made out of plywood painted white with chartreuse and purple balls on it while everyone else had a live green tree decorated with tinsel and angels and strings of popcorn and the like.

To make it worse, mother put the plywood tree up on the grand piano in the living room so that people could see it from the street. Then she opened these lacy drapes she had on the front windows. Then she went outside and turned a spotlight light on the tree so that anybody passing by could see it especially well at night. Then she came back inside and adjusted the tree to give it maximum exposure. I watched each step of this process with mounting anxiety. Nobody else in the family seemed to mind, but I hated that blankety-blank tree.

I tried to keep all the boys in my crowd away from our house that Christmas. Unfortunately, one of my neighborhood cronies—I think it was Lawrence Calhoun or J.O. Oliver—did see it, and soon boys were gathering in front of our house at 935 Blandford Avenue just to stare at our tree. If there had been a flashing neon sign in our front window that Christmas saying “House of Ill Repute” it could not have attracted more attention, or so it seemed to me.

Merry Christmas

P.S. I hope that none of you get one of my father’s ties this year. Several are said to still be in circulation in Overlook.

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