On the First Day of Christmas

For the next 25 days my posts will be on various issues about Christmas growing up. The idea in the geneaological blogging community is for participants to blog about a different Christmas memory (ies) each day according to that day's theme.
Each day (hopefully) I'll submit a different post on a different topic. You can read it here, and if you like to read about people's Christmas memories, you can read the host blog by THOMAS (Click Here) who will provide summaries and links to participating bloggers' Christmas Memories posts. Through his page you can also see the topics for the entire month.

December 1 Post Topic: The Christmas Tree.

I only recall having artificial trees growing up. Some people think that's horrible but I only have good memories of our trees. I think my mother might disagree to a point, but I digress. Our tree went up Thanksgiving weekend and came down New Year's day. As an adult, I follow this same practice (minus the platform, unfortunately).

The above picture is actually taken from my Aunt Norie's scrapbook and I presume it was the Christmas tree she had as a teenager, since other pictures show here in front of it. The platform beneath the tree, however, is what stirs memories for me.

While hard to see in this picture, there are village houses, pine trees, people, mountain paper and brick paper. And a Nativity Scene. These items originally belonged to my great-grandparents Edward and Justina (Nahodil) HODICK. They were passed down to my grandmother Mary, and then to my father. We used to put up a huge plywood-based platform under the tree just like grandma and grandpa did here. On one side of the tree we set up the village, on the other, the nativity. We then made a path from the village to the manger out of dirt (when available in December in Western NY) or coffee. The tree was placed similarly to the one above.

Our Christmas Tree provided many happy memories while growing up. The entire village and nativity were passed down to my brother. Hopefully, he still gets some use of them.

Oh, you might be wondering why my mother may not have felt the same as I do about the Christmas Tree and Platform? While we all pitched in to help put it up, we somehow managed to "be busy" when it was time to take it all down, leaving mom to do it herself. Every year she'd say "That's it. No tree or platform next year."

But she never made good on that threat.