Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: December 19th, 2013

Remember the time we had our big Christmas dinner at Annie’s place?  It was pop’s last Christmas and Aunt Noma was there, old Lester had in the meantime died.  Afterwards, she said:  “That was the best Christmas dinner that I ever had.  Those old gals couldn’t cook.  They couldn’t follow a recipe and so they always flugged up.”  We all laughed at that flugged up comment, but pop didn’t.  He thought that was one of the ways you said it.  The year before, mom and I had visited Aunt Noma in the assisted living home in North Bend.  Uncle Lester was still alive and Aunt Noma and some other man were rehearsing a”Christmas”  song that they were going to give as part of their Christmas program.  She looked over at Uncle Lester and said, “He’s a nice old fellow.”  Then she went on to play the song.  It was Home on the Range.  She said it was a Christmas song because it was about home and all that sort of thing.  I laughed later and so did mom and then I told pop that that was the song they were going to play for Christmas and he said, “Yes, that is a nice Christmas song, it is about home and all that sort of thing.”  He used the exact same words that Aunt Noma had used.  Those three talked and thought a lot alike.  But now to the story.

When I was growing up, we tried always to get a tree from our place.  Often during the course of the year, we would spot a tree and say, that looks like a good tree for Christmas.  We always had a Douglas fir or a grand fir or even a noble fir, but always a fir.  Sometimes, we would get a tree that had a great top and a good bottom, but was kind of measly in the middle.  So, we would still take it and pop would saw out a foot or two out of the middle and then put in a bar to put the tree back together.  Trees like that did not last very long, but then pop did not like a tree to be up too long anyway.  But one year we had a disaster.  We simply could not find a suitable tree.  We scoured the place, but no tree.  The idea of buying a tree never even occurred to us.  So, we decided to head out and find a tree alongside of the road.  We drove around the back roads and didn’t find anything.  Then suddenly, I think it was Bob who spotted the perfect tree, the right height, the right shape, a douglas fir, just perfect.  So, we got out of the car, I grabbed the saw, pop stayed in the pickup, and we looked at the tree close up and yes, it was just what we were looking for.  So, Bob held the tree and I crawled down under the tree and started sawing away.  All of a sudden Bob said, “There is a house over there, it looks like we are in somebody’s yard, we are in somebody’s yard and I can see their living room right from here.”  The question now was, what should we do?  I was half way through the tree.  Well, said I, let’s cut this fast and get out of here.  So I sawed as fast as I could, the tree came down, Bob grabbed in and we ran for the pickup.  We threw the tree into the back of the pickup, jumped into the cab followed by Bob and I said, we have to get out of here quick.  Bob elaborated, we took that tree out of somebody’s back yard.  Pop did not need to be told twice, we were out of there.  As it turns out, I don’t think anybody was home, but when they got home, they must have scratched their heads.  But maybe they did not even own that tree.  At any rate, it was one of the best trees we ever had.  Bob and I thought on occasion about going back and seeing what we had done, but we never did.  The next year we got a tree off the place, no more excitement.

But there is a sequel to the story.  When Lisa, Christi and Karin were small, we would go out and find and cut a tree from a U-Cut place  We would wonder around and finally find a nice tree, cut it, and then go home.  We discovered one area that had not been picked over and the trees were perfect.  We went back there two or three times and then one year we went back and found the area roped off.  We had been cutting somebody else’s trees and paying the U-Cut fellow for the trees that we had taken.  Ah well, Christmas has a way of being unusual.
Merry Christmas to everybody.  My advice to you all is to get a tree from some place that causes no excitement.  Excitement is not good.