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Nick Jimenez
Nick
Jimenez, Caller-Times editor, writes a weekly editorial column Sundays. He can
be reached at 361-886-3787 or
jimenezn@caller.com.
Sunday, December 17, 2000
Even with a plastic tree, the spirit lives
A time-honored Christmas tradition went down the tubes at our house this year. We've gone artificial and I'm thankful for it.
After years of hauling and struggling with fresh, natural Christmas trees, we relented this Navidad and went for the plastic. There in our living room, in all its ersatz glory, is a tree composed of steel, wire, plastic and unknown materials. I think I can come to love this thing.
For one thing, that baby went up in a flash. Just slip a couple of poles together and then start sticking on the limbs. Voila!, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas.
Am I going to miss the smell of fresh pine needles filling the air? Am I going to miss the link with Christmas past? Nah.
We'd still be in the natural Christmas tree game if we used the Nick Jimenez selection method: Give me the best $35 tree you got, buddy.
But no. We have used the Maria method.
Each Christmas we have ventured out searching for a tree that can't be too skinny, that can't have too many gaps, that must be bushy in the right places, but not too stubby, tall but not too tall. We have been on the trail of a tree that exudes Christmas with its deep green and its soaring beautifully tapered tip, its lush branches symmetrically descending with mathematical precision.
This is a tree that doesn't exist.
But I'm wrong. It does exist and it is in the hands of the guy who just bought it. There, my wife says, pointing at the departing tree, find a tree like that one. Like a crusader in the search for the Holy Grail, I have failed in my quest.
As we went from tree lot to tree lot, I would imagine this possibility: Get someone to drag a tree by and as soon as my spouse would say, "Get one like that one," I would spring forward and say, "Gotcha."
I won't miss wrestling with the Christmas tree stand either. There isn't a stand in the world that will actually hold a Christmas tree on the first try. Oh, they look pretty sturdy on the packaging, lulling you into promises that the stand will hold a tree like a Kansas prairie holds a telephone pole. Don't try selling that to a man who has spent hours turning screws, hammering nails, and even weaving fishing line, anything just to keep that bunch of pine needles upright, at least until the Christmas gifts are unwrapped.
I don't feel we're diminishing Christmas with our plastic tree because there's a lot about Christmas that's artificial. The true message of Christmas has a difficult time getting heard above the piped-in Christmas music, the heavy merchandising and layers of manipulated emotion. But despite the attempts to shove out the stuff about goodwill toward men, the Christmas spirit is kept alive because people keep it alive.
Every day since Thanksgiving, I have heard from people who want to help children in South Texas, their neighbors. They want to know how they can participate in the Caller-Times Children's Christmas Appeal. For 26 years, thousands of donors have kept the Christmas spirit alive by helping children.
This week I got a call from someone who said that poor children need help all the time, not just at Christmas. That caller is right. The poverty that crushes hope isn't limited to one season. But the Children's Christmas Appeal is about the possible. If hundreds of donors can light the eyes of as many children as they can on Christmas morning, the program will have accomplished its purpose. I figure that's also the purpose of all the other holiday charity programs like the Children's Christmas Appeal. Just because we can't save the world doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do what we can.
That part of the holiday spirit is more genuine than a forest of freshly cut Christmas trees. What's so natural about sticking a branch of a pine tree in the middle of a South Texas house anyway?
(Nick Jimenez can be reached by phone at 886-3787 or by e-mail at jimenezn@caller.com.)
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