Spiritual Smart Aleck: O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, I love your plastic branches

There are people who would rather eat a bug than get a fake Christmas tree. I am not one of those people.

I used to be, especially when the kids were little. Going to a tree farm or a tree lot to get our Christmas tree was a fine family outing. Sometimes.

The kids loved the tree and some years took the initiative to help decorate it, but mostly it was a mom project, and let’s face it, they were more interested in what went under the tree than what went on it.

In 2000 my mother told me that she wasn’t going to get a tree that Christmas because it was too much fuss. I could understand what she was saying – she was 85 and we know now was not feeling well – but I hated to think of her having no tree.

I was working at the then-True Value Hardware store, and we had these adorable little trees that had fiberoptics in the branches, and a color wheel in the base so the fibers changed colors. It was maybe two feet tall, if that. For most people it would be a decoration, not the Christmas tree, but I thought it would be just right for my mom’s little house, and she could set it up and plug it in and voila! Christmas tree! I bought one and mailed it off to her. She got it, and stowed it in her car’s trunk, unopened, and there it stayed.

Well.

On the 22nd of December, she began to feel poorly. She’d been having “terrible stomach aches” for a couple of years, and this was a bad one. She eventually got home and collapsed in bed, where she stayed.

Some neighbors of hers wondered how she was the morning of the 23rd and came over to check on her. They called 911 and my mother was taken to Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, where she was diagnosed with a heart attack. Two of the arteries in her heart were completely blocked. A couple of stents later she was booked into their critical care unit and put into a medical coma so her body could recover.

I hopped a plane down to San Jose, where I rented a Geo Metro, a car about the size and stability of a soda can.

I spent a lot of time at the hospital that week. My brother and sister-in-law flew in from New Mexico, and together we all waited to see which way our mother was going to tip. Her cardiologist told us to get ready for the worst.

But she hung in there. I stayed about a week, until she was stabilized, and it looked like she was going to survive this. I realized they were not going to wake her up for a while yet. I flew home.

When they woke her from the coma and I talked to her on the phone, I realized that her brain was scrambled from her coma experience. She was in a hospital room, and she told me, “This is a funny house. There are people coming in and out all the time.”

So now I know not to be alarmed when someone wakes up from a coma with a scrambled brain. She regained her sense and her senses in the days that followed.

She was transported to a recovery/rehabilitation center in Capitola. My cousins, Charlotte and Nancy, went down from the Bay Area to visit her. She loved that – they really did cheer her up.

When she was ready to leave rehab, my brother and sister-in-law came back, picked her up, and took her home with them to New Mexico, where their yellow lab kept trying to grab the tennis balls on the end of her walker’s legs.

I went to visit her in early March. She wanted to go home to her house in California. Which was not to be.

The last day when I was getting ready to leave, she sat down at their piano and began playing, and I sang the songs she played. She was my first accompanist, way back when we stood around her piano and she played and we sang I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover, and The Caissons Go Rolling Along, and the Army Air Corps song – “Off we go into the wild blue yonder …”

Those aren’t the songs she played that day. I don’t remember what she played, only that she did play, and I did sing. I knew this was the last time I would see her, and it seemed like a perfect ending for us, music.

After she died, that Christmas tree, still in its shipping box, was one of the things I brought home. For Christmas, 2001, I got it out and set it up, and hung jewelry ornaments on it – mostly pearl earrings I picked up at Granny’s Attic for $1.50 a pop – and that was our Christmas tree that year. By that time the boys were 19 and 16 and not so into Christmas. They still got presents, and we still had our silly string shoot-out at the end of opening presents – that was a tradition for a few years, and I have seldom laughed so hard.

For a few years, that little tree was our Christmas tree. Rick and I loved it. It was no fuss, no big deal, and it got the job done. I’m not sure when or where I lost it.

Since then I’ve had a succession of fake trees. Sometimes I’d buy them at Granny’s before Christmas and donate them back after Christmas.

The I got one last year that I really like, so I kept it, and when it was time to set it up this year, I discovered that its base was gone. So I got another base, meant for a real tree, and somehow made it work. Duct tape, my friends, duct tape.