How Lovely Are Your Branches
A brief history of the Christmas tree and the art of navigating family relationships. It isn’t Christmas time unless you feel some emotion, right?
The first Victorian-era Christmas trees were short table-top evergreens. Pocket-sized gifts hung off the branches and candles often lit the boughs.
In the 1990s, my late father used our customary six-foot trees to teach me how to weave lights through the branches for optimal lighting. “Like this” he’d say while snaking the wire on the branches towards the trunk then back out, “This way it’s lit from inside.”
The Christmas trees of my childhood were oversized, at least to me. My parents would go for the six-foot-ones with the least bare spots. I’d watch the men at the tree lot make a fresh cut in the trunk then push and pull it through the ring with plastic netting. They moved, rolled, and hoisted the tree effortlessly. My mother showed me how to check the water level and made it my special job to water the tree. In hindsight, I think she figured I was small enough to squeeze underneath the bottom branches.
Conifers are adapted to thrive in cold environments. Their waxy, thin needles hold water, their conical shapes help minimize snow piling up on their branches, and their thick…
