Everyday until Christmas, I am going to try to post a picture from a past family Christmas. 

I decided on this picture because of the story that goes with it.  My parents bought this house in 1963 and it was the first fire place we had.  We had trouble with smoke coming in the house instead of up the chimney.  Someone told us that it was because the furnace and the fireplace shared the same chimney, and when the furnace turned on it created a down draft and the fireplace smoked.  However, my mother decided one Christmas Eve day that she wanted to burn some pine to get that pine smell in the house.  We had an aluminum tree so no longer got the nice pine smell from the tree.  I went with her to a Christmas tree lot and she asked for the scrawniest tree they had.  We got one that was bare.  I remember feeling embarrassed as we carried it to the car and hoping I didn’t see anyone I knew.  We brought it home and sawed it up.  That evening she threw some of the pine branches on the fire and it smoked so bad that we had to leave the house.  We left the house with windows and doors open as our company and us walked around the block a couple of times until the house cleared.  

My mother asked my father to saw a branch off one of our trees in December.  He obliged her and she spray painted it white, put lights on it and few little ornaments.  She diplayed it on our front porch.  At the time she took a lot of teasing from everyone because it was just a bare branch painted white.  At the time we had never seen anyone else do this, but since then I have seen them all over and in store window displays.  I guess she was a little a head of time on this one.

Copyright © 2019 Gail Grunst