How Christmas has changed - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

An item on the news one night recently caught my attention. It said that Christmas tree yards in the Toronto area expected there to be a shortage of trees this year because growers did not cut as many trees as they sometimes do.

 

It seems that it costs so much money to plant a tree and nurse it through all the years it takes to grow a tree to the size customers want that growers are wary of having cut trees go to waste. Big growers cut trees to send to Europe and the U.S. as well as to big-city Christmas tree lots in eastern Canada so it becomes wasteful if even a relatively few trees are not sold.

 

In another story, a Christmas tree grower who sold trees at his farm said fears about the effects of climate change influenced his preparations, but fortunately last spring we had plenty of rain so this year’s trees were healthy.

 

My own family’s Christmas tree use has changed greatly over the decades. As a kid, it became a signal, as Christmas approached, to visit my uncle’s farm a few miles away. The odd year we could drive back on the unused sideroad that led to the plantation of evergreen trees near the back of the farm, but far more often I recall having to plunge through snow to the rear of the farm, then plunge back to the car dragging a future Christmas tree.

 

We had a spruce tree because that’s what was in the plantation, but my best friend and next-door neighbour had cedar trees from the swamp at the back of their farm. 

 

When I got older, Jill and I got married just before Christmas while I was still a university student. I surprised her by buying a tree (don’t ask me where, now) and decorating it for our new apartment so she’d be surprised when we got home from the wedding. (Since we had little money, our “honeymoon” consisted of a train ride home to my parents’ place for Christmas.)

 

The next few years, buying and decorating a Christmas tree was an annual delight, first for ourselves and then for our four kids as they came along, first in Clinton, then in Blyth and finally in our country home outside of Blyth. Decorations became more varied, as relatives travelled widely and sent home ornaments, but we always kept a few of the cheap ornaments I’d bought in a Woolworth’s store near our first apartment to decorate that first tree.

 

The location of our Christmas celebrations also changed. I remember going to my father’s parents’ place when I was very young, and my grandfather surprising me with a tricycle. I rode it proudly in the neighbourhood because it was newer than any of my friends’ trikes. Later, of course, we grew out of trikes and I had to ride my older sister’s girl’s bike, much to my shame.

 

As we grew older, my parents played host to the family, with both grandmothers (my grandfathers had died) and aunts and uncles coming to my parents’ house. After we were married, it became our turn to host the family Christmas. Now we are the old folks and we no longer host Christmas, travelling instead to our middle daughter’s home south of Blyth. Her children are all grown now and I wonder how long it will be before my daughter and her husband visit, instead, with one of their daughters.
Our Christmas tree traditions have also changed. For a while we visited a grower near Blyth to pick out a tree. After that, we used to go to the Londesborough Lions’ lot for a tree.

 

As we got older, we eventually bought an artificial tree to decorate. We had that for a few years, but then, when we no longer hosted Christmas, the whole task of getting the tree out, setting it up and decorating it, seemed too much. We gave the tree away.

 

One of our daughters thought it was terrible that we didn’t have any sort of Christmas tree so she bought a small tree we simply hide away in an unused bedroom for most of the year. And so our Christmas traditions change, over generations. 

 

One of the changes I’ve seen in general is that every year the reason for Christmas - the celebration of the birth of Christ - seems to recede a little more into the background, and the Santa side of Christmas, and the gift-giving, take over a little more. In general, our churches struggle to keep going and there are fewer ministers to run them. Christmas carols are sung less often; Christmas songs, more.

 

Present-giving, originally based on the gifts the Shepherds and Wise Men gave Christ, has become even a bigger part of the modern Christmas. I remember, as a child of poor farmers, getting one toy from Santa and one from my parents. We hosted Christmas a few years ago and were flabbergasted at the succession of gifts some parents gave their kids.

 

So, Christmas has changed as, in general, we’ve become more affluent. The progression in my long lifetime is tremendous. But gifts and decorations in the long run matter little. What matters is the love the season promotes.