Christmas at the Cullens

For a lot of families today Christmas season begins at Thanksgiving (or before) and lasts until the Epiphany, Jan. 6.

Not at the Cullen homestead on Geneseo Street when I was growing up.

We didn’t put our tree up until a week or two before Christmas, and it came down promptly the day after Christmas. The main reason was Mom’s fear of a Christmas tree fire that would burn down the house.

It doesn’t happen so much today, with fake fireproof trees so common, but it was a big fear in the 1950s, when most people used real trees and homes weren’t protected by smoke detectors. Every Christmas season there would be devastating fires in homes across America, and the culprit was almost always a dried out Christmas tree and faulty lights.

Our tree went up in a full bucket of water and Mom made sure it stayed full. If there was no one in the living room the lights on the tree were turned off.

Fake trees were uncommon in the 50s because they were just plain ugly. Most were silver and hideous. Now fake trees look as good or better than real trees, but you can’t beat the holiday smell of a real pine tree.

Our tree came down the first thing Dec. 26, covering the carpet with needles as the scruffy old timber was pulled through the house, out the front door, and dumped unceremoniously on the curb, where it would be picked up by the city or garbage collectors or Boy Scouts, I’m not sure which. They just disappeared eventually. It would take weeks of vacuuming to rid the house of those spiky needles hiding in the carpet.

We made the mistake of burning the tree in our fireplace one year. That made quite a fireball. Dad outlawed the practice after that.

Christmas was the only day of the year when we used our fireplace, primarily to burn all the Christmas wrappings. Other than that it went unused in our living room the rest of the year. You know, there was that fire fear again that was shared by our parents. Dad made double, triple and quadruple sure that the damper was opened to the chimney so the house wouldn’t fill up with smoke. When we were done, he made double, triple and quadruple sure again that the damper was closed so we weren’t letting all of the heat from the furnace escape out the chimney. “We’re not heating the whole neighborhood,” he’d remind us.

I didn’t like the fireplace because it would fall on me for some unexplained reason to clean out the ash pit underneath the fireplace in the basement. I’d have to use a little shovel just made for that purpose to clean out the ashes and dump them in a bucket, then haul the bucket of ash outside. It was a dirty job and explains why today, in our house that has two fireplaces, we have never had a fire in either of them in the 40 years we have lived there.

Our kids grew up with a fake Christmas tree. It didn’t look too bad, but over the years we misplaced branches or put them in the wrong positions and the tree eventually looked like it came from Chernobyl. Mary and I decorated the top of the tree and the kids would take care of the bottom, then we’d lift Bridget or Justin up so they could place the star on the top of the tree. We are no longer able to lift Bridget (age 38) or Justin (age 35) to the top of the tree, so for the past couple of years we have used a little fake tree that’s about two feet tall and rotates on an electric turntable on top of the coffee table.

So that’s the heartwarming tale of Christmas with the Cullens. Now it’s on to a Happy New Year. God bless you everyone!