A Christmas Tale

When I was a young girl we lived in the middle of the city and I loved looking at the people walking past from our first story window. Once a few days before Christmas I saw people go home carrying a Christmas tree. As we came closer to Christmas I began to worry that we still didn’t have a Christmas tree. Eventually it was Christmas Eve – the 24th of December. Finally in the morning my Father said: come, now we get ourselves a Christmas tree. It had snowed and we went to a nursery outside of the city. My father took great pains to select the right Christmas tree. It had to be totally even all round. This was very important to him. Later on I also understood why. He had made the stand for our Christmas tree himself and the best thing about it was that it could be turned. That is why the Christmas tree had to be even all round.

The drama started in the evening, when we were already in bed. By this stage Father was already quite drunk. Mother had to decorate the tree. Sitting on the couch, Father directed and told Mother where each bauble had to go. Mother became more and more nervous. The big balls had to go right at the bottom and then evenly decreasing in size as they went up the tree. It had to look the same from all directions. Later on during the war it was impossible to buy any Christmas decorations and they became fewer and more and more valuable. By this stage we were no longer living in the city but in a village house. One Christmas eve I heard from my bed Father getting more and more drunk and Mother more and more nervous and then it happened. She took the entire tree together with decorations and threw it through the window into the yard. This must have been a big shock for my Father and of course for me too, even though I wasn’t fully aware of what had happened. It became very quiet. And finally when Father was in bed, she went and brought the tree back in and luckily because of the snow outside not too many decorations had broken.
Years later, after I was married with three children, we migrated to Australia. We tried very hard to maintain our beautiful German Christmas tradition. The first years I always wished that it would at least rain on Christmas eve. It was so difficult to create the right Christmas atmosphere on Christmas eve when the sun was shining brightly and the day was warm. And there was no hope of getting a proper Christmas tree. We went into the bush to find something that looked similar to the German pine trees. Then over the years things improved and eventually we even had a Christmas tree…not the same as in Germany but similar. But I could never decorate the tree because our custom was to only put the tree up after dinner on Christmas eve and then I was always busy with other things. Actually I was always a bit disappointed. The tree never looked the way my father taught me to decorate a tree. But I doubt if anyone else noticed. Then later on we started celebrating Christmas at Inge’s place. And so that I did not miss out on a tree for Christmas I finally had the opportunity to decorate my own Christmas tree. And I discovered that it was not all that easy. Now I am thankful when someone else does it.