For most of the year, all our holiday decorations resided in a big cardboard box or two under the basement stairs. One box had Halloween stuff, and costumes from years past. Another had Easter baskets, fake grass, plastic eggs, and the like. The biggest box of all had the Christmas decorations.
We always had an artificial tree. Sacrilege I know, but we did have real trees once in a while, but for years, it was the artificial one. Until we were older, only mom or dad brought the box upstairs. Only mom or dad unpacked it, carefully inspecting for broken bulbs in the lights, or any damaged ornaments. There always seemed to be a couple that didn’t survive the round trip into and out of storage.
With the box unpacked, dad built the tree, putting each metal end of the bottle brush looking branches into the appropriate hole in the stand. At best, a kid might hand over the next batch of branches, poked through a numbered card to hold them together, and organize them.
Mom would hang the big Santa head on the front door, and the red, lighted, plastic Christmas bells in the window. Various jobs of helping would be given to us kids, as our skills allowed. Sometimes it was just a matter of the older ones keeping the littler ones in line, and from being too nosey around the box of decorations.
The lights were the next to go up. Always a job for dad, and sometimes mom. It depended on how much they wanted to get into a fight or not. When we got older, helping put the lights on the tree was a huge privilege, and something of a right of passage. Of course, before the lights could go up, each strand had to be untangled. Somehow the light strands managed to do that, no matter how careful they were stored.
The lights were 25 watt bulbs, shaped in a rounded cone shape, and if one bulb was out, the whole strand wouldn’t work. The procedure was to take a new bulb, or one you knew worked, and methodically replace one bulb at a time, until the lights either came on, or the whole strand was replaced. If the lights stayed dark, there was at least 2 or more bulbs out. Then, about all you could do is get one strand working, and swap bulbs into it to weed out bad bulbs.
In later years we went to the new kind of lights, the kind in use today with the tiny bulbs that just plug in to the strand.
With the lights working, and wrapped around the tree, next was the tinsel. Usually a job for mom, or any of the older kids. Finally, the ornaments went on the tree. Guided by mom, kids would place one ornament on at a time, until they were all on the tree. Over the years, the number of ornaments grew, despite the occasional broken one, and to put them all on was just too gaudy, and weird looking.
The final piece of decorations were the star, and hanging icicles, and once in a while, spray on snow. Who ever thought up spray on snow should be taken out and shot. Sure, it might look nice if done right, but the coating didn’t come off well, and through being stored, it clumped up, and didn’t survive well for the next season. Icicles were thin strips of aluminum. A few here, and a few there, and it added a nice affect. Not a thing to over do. They are also tempting to fingers of little kids, and some pets, since they dangle into easy reach. Our “star” was actually a spire, with a light, and a tuft of angel hair inside it. It was the one and only star that I ever remember having, and was always carefully placed on top by dad. It was a rare treat in older years to be the one who got to top off the tree with the star.
The whole while, there would be Christmas music playing on our record player. I know we had two favorite Christmas albums, but there had to have been more. I suppose there was one more thing to go on the tree, but it was usually in the later stages of decorating. Putting on the candy canes. Due to their edible, and consumable nature, they had to be replaced a few times through the season. These days, there are lots of different flavors, but the only kind we had were the red and white striped, peppermint canes. In later years, Canes with cherry flavor were a novelty, and we might use a blend of flavors and colored canes.
Under the tree, a white blanket of cottony material hid the base of the tree, like a bank of snow wrapped around it. Other under the tree decorations included a manger scene, a lighted snowman and Santa. For a while, we had one of those floor lamps that shown through a colored disk. The disk had red, green, and blue, and rotated past the bulb, to change the color of the tree as it turned .
We never had a sat date to put up the tree, or take it down. Some years it would go up before Thanksgiving, some times not until the first week or so of December. Our tree always stayed up past the new year, but not much longer, and it never stayed up past the middle of January. At that time, the tree and decorations would be taken down in reverse order, and get packed away for the next season, finding their home again under the basement stairs.
For family traditions with our kids, things pretty much stayed the way I described, only with a little more chaos, and letting kids do more earlier on, when it came to lights. We had our own ornament collection that grew and shrank in the storage process. Christmas albums on tape and CD, instead of records, and more real trees, just to name a few differences.