It's always during this time of the year I'm reminded of our 1st Christmas tree,
as it wasn't your typical pine, spruce or
flocked greenery but a special kind of
tree that was hand made by . . .
my husband and me.
We were newlyweds, married about a
month and a half when we celebrated
our first Christmas together as . . .
Mr. and Mrs.
Being in the military back then, we had
just arrived to our new location and
found a two room apartment off base in Newfoundland, Canada. It was very
cold and snow everywhere and quite a
change of climate from what I was use
to, but I found it amusing to see frozen
longjohns swinging on the neighbors
clothesline as stiff as a board waving
in mid air.
We didn't have much but a bed and a
table with two chairs that we were able
to get from the base housing for our
temporary use till our name came up on a waiting list for military housing.
We only had a couple of months to wait but in the meantime; we made do with what we had.
I smile now as I remembered that little
apartment. The bed took up most of the space in one room that the only way
to get in was to crawl over each other
and there was a fire escape stairs just
outside our bedroom window.
The table and chairs was across from the kitchen sink and the bathroom was
tiny and mostly cold with a shower about the size of a gym locker.
Many a nights we would leave the radio
on that was above the refrigerator just to hear some music to fall asleep with
or to listen to Christmas carols.
The area across the kitchen was bare
except for our small television sitting on
a cardboard box on the floor. We would
take turns turning the television towards
either the table or our bedroom when we wanted to watch something on it.
Tho it didn't seem like much at the time,
we were excited to have a place we had
called "our" home.
Christmas was just a week away and since we didn't own or have any decorations and couldn't afford to really
buy any at that time; we decided to make our own little tree to help put us in a holiday spirit and to cheer up that
bare room.
We took the ribbons that I had saved
from some of our wedding presents and
cut them in about seven different lengths from short to long and tacked
each length from wall to wall across a
cornered area not far from the television. Then we cut a star from a thin cardboard and covered it with tin foil then taped it across the top short length of ribbon representing the top
of the tree. We also gift wrapped two empty shoe boxes and stood them on the floor in the corner under the ribbon
tree. Guess you could say, it was art in
progress and it was starting to bring a little cheer in that room.
Since we were recieving both wedding
and Christmas cards from friends and
relatives, we hung these cards over the
strand of ribbons till our card tree took
shape. The monies that came with some of these cards was placed in the empty shoe boxes and not touched till
Christmas.
With only the light reflecting from the
television, it made the glitter on the cards sparkle as if there was little tiny
colored lights on them.
We stood in front of it with our arms
around each other feeling very proud
of our 1st Christmas tree and ended
up sleeping on the floor next to it on
Christmas eve.
On Christmas day, we discovered that
the monies that was in the shoe boxes
was enough to buy us a nice toaster,
a vacumn and a electric skillet. It was
just what we needed and made good use of for many years after.
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