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It was 1957. Elvis’ Christmas Album had been released and was zooming up the charts. I was 11 years old. We lived in a modest, post-war subdivision in East Ridge. I was the 2nd of 5 children at the time. 2 more would arrive in the 60’s. I loved the Christmas season because it was the only time of year that I got to do something with my Dad. Just us. The highlight was going to Christmas tree lots and trying to find the right tree at the right price. Dad was partial to the cedars and would assess a dozen before trying to negotiate a price. My opinion seemed to matter to him. My mother made the trip with us, once. She wanted a spruce. I can still hear them arguing. Dad worked downtown in Chattanooga’s EPB Building on the corner of 6th & Market. He was a Vanderbilt-graduate, electrical engineer at TVA, and would scour the downtown for bargains. One Christmas, he brought home a cardboard Santa Clause that was 4’ tall and 3’ wide. I thought it was the grandest thing I’d ever seen. We placed Santa in the street-facing picture window of our living room, and sprayed the awesome new artificial snow all around it. Dad and I worked well into the evening hooking-up a spot light in the front yard, illuminating Santa. I stayed in the yard marveling at the sight until my mother threatened my life unless I came back in the house. Another Christmas, years earlier, we drove to a lovely farmhouse on a large cattle farm in the remote Fairfield community of east Bedford County (now but 10 miles from Exit 97 on I-24) and stayed with ‘Granny and Uncle Glenn,’ the parents of friends of my Mom & Dad. One afternoon, I joined the ‘men folk’ for a walkabout on the farm and am fairly confident, upon seasoned reflection, that they were imbibing spirits. They were most boisterous for grown-ups, when not talking about the war, Republicans, or the Russians. We were hunting mistletoe. One of the men had a shotgun. All took turns trying to shoot off a branch that secured a large clump of the prized mistletoe, in between sips from shiny silver flasks. Then, they handed me the gun, which was as long as I was tall, and told me to shoot it at the green prize. After aiming carefully, I squeezed the trigger and a mighty blast came from the weapon, knocking me to the ground. The men erupted in laughter as if they’d never seen anything more amusing. The mistletoe fell from the tree and I carried the prize back to the house. We joined the ‘women folk’ for more merriment around a large fireplace until cobwebs filled my brain. I slept well and deeply in a feather bed that night, an oil lamp burning on a bedstand near the chamber pot. A few years later, perhaps mindful of that memorable mistletoe hunt, an elementary school mate joined me in a wooded expanse that is now the path of I-24 as it comes out of Chattanooga from Missionary Ridge and proceeds to its terminus at I-75. For several afternoons in December, we swung axes at a mighty oak which held the largest assortment of mistletoe I’d ever seen, before or since. Totally oblivious to the environmental devastation we were inflicting (though the Interstate made all actions moot a few years later), we finally felled that beautiful specimen and harvested the mistletoe for many days, which we sold at handsome prices throughout the subdivisions of Brainerd. Adult women seemed particularly willing to pay a premium. Dad showed me how to decorate with greenery, too. We took delight in clipping branches from a large Holly tree on the adjacent parochial school property, with the permission of the Pastor. We’d take the modest amount of clippings them back to the house, then carefully weave them into the wrought-iron that framed our front porch. The house never looked better than when we had finished that task, especially at night when the luminescence of the floodlight aimed at Santa would spill over to the porch and reflect on the shiny holly leaves. My father was the most important person in my life in those years, and in later years, too. I’ve always had a love of the Christmas season, largely because of the impressions made in those moments by his side. This will be the first Christmas without Dad, who died March 28.
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