The Christmas tree was the topic of a recent family round-robin out here on Wetherbee Street. The discussion, or controversy if you please, comes up every year about this time when Old Stuff announces that he can remember when the tree was NOT a Christmas institution, so far as individual families in Greenville were concerned.
To which Dove replies that they always had a tree at her house, then throws in a vivid description of how they strung popcorn and cranberries for decorations et cetera.
Well, we never had one at our house, so this offsets the situation in the Valliant-Eskrigge-Miller household. As we recollect, there were two schools of thought, namely the stockings ("hung by the chimney with care") and tree. If you hung your stocking on the mantel-piece, you did not have a tree and, if you had a tree you didn't hang your stocking.
To which Dove replies that they hung stockings at her house and had a tree, too.
Undoubtedly the tree deal was more convenient for Santa Claus, who could shake the loot from the sack, then get the show back the road, whereas having to stuff stockings would really tighten his schedule.
Another argument stems from our experiences in the merchandising of Christmas trees during our senior year in High School. went from house to house, taking orders for trees, and sold five or six at most. A few days before Christmas we hired Squire Jenkins and his horse and dray to go with us to a cedar-thicket south of town. (Squire's widow, Fannie Jenkins, worked for Gamble and Archer clinic for many years, and died only a few ago.) We cut down about ten and loaded them aboard the Jenkins dray, and delivered the ones we had sold in advance as soon as we got back to town. We put the rest of them on our front porch, and passed the word via grapevine telegraph that we still had Christmas trees to sell.
Will Percy bought one of these four for the Christmas party and dance at the Elysian Club (Now the public library which bears his name), Mrs. C. E. Couty bought one (she lived where Mrs. S. Goodman lives now), someone else the third and, late on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Mrs. Ernest Smith telephoned and bought our last tree sight unseen. We remember that it was tall and not too well-branched, having been shaded out by some of the bigger cedars as it was coming along. But Lily Smith said she didn't care, as she would stand the tree with its flat side to living-room wall.
And that was that. The point we are trying to make is that boy who was trying to make himself more Christmas money would have aimed for a bigger volume than ten trees if Greenville people had been Christmas-tree-minded in that day and time.
Our closing argument, and one which almost shakes Dove's resolution, is that there is no mention of a tree in "The Night Before Christmas," that immortal fantasy which is linked so inseparably with the yuletide.
But that was long ago. Nowadays there are trees for sale on nearly every corner, but yesterday morning they ran out of same the AP Store on Highway 1. Manager Holloway told a disappointed customer to came back four that afternoon, when a fresh shipment was due in from Oregon.
"Why make the lady wait, Brother Holloway," says Kibitzer Old Stuff, "Why not send your truck over to St. Joseph's School and get yourself a load of good trees?"
If that ain't a plug, we've seen one! And now, we're thinking of a picture we found in files of this newspaper, showing one of our favorite gray ladies the act of buying a Christmas tree at St. Joseph's School in '54. She is laughing, and so is the salesman, Mr. Henry Oltremari, and Miss Evelyn (for Mrs. Harold) Fox told us afterward that they were laughing about what she would do with the prize lamb case she won it in the Christmas drawing.
