The Cat Chronicles

 Day 15

This is the day, in what was supposed to be my new home for life, my humans went over the edge – around the bend – off the deep end with no life preserver.

My humans planted a tree in the house!

They planted a tree in the house.  No kidding.  A gigantic, touch-the-ceiling monster. It’s so tall I don’t think I could climb to the top of it even with a flying leap. Of course, it would be an interesting experiment…

They brought it into the house while I was sleeping. I smelled it before I saw it. And, when I did, I admit I freaked out.  I ran, I hid, and I took another nap. Later in the day, I went to see if it was still there.  It might have been a bad dream.

There's cold white stuff outside

Nope.  Still there.  Don’t ask me what kind of a tree it is.  I’m a Florida cat. I know six kinds of palm trees. I can tell you the difference between a jacaranda and a royal poinciana, and I’m only eight months old.  But I’m not in Florida anymore, and it isn’t just that three-hour plane ride.  There’s this white stuff all over the ground, and it’s cold (I put my nose against a window; a mistake I won’t make twice).

Day 16

This morning, they put lights on it!

This morning, my humans went even further over the edge.  They put lights all over the tree.  Hundreds of them! Give me one good reason why a tree needs lights.  It isn’t going anywhere and it’s not exactly a navigation hazard.  My two humans are going to be carted off to the loony bin and no one is going to feed me.  But putting on lights wasn’t the end of their lunatic behavior: they disappeared downstairs (I had no idea this place had a ‘downstairs’! But now I do…) and they came up with giant plastic bins that smelled… old.  They opened them and I smelled years of stuff.

Being just eight months old, I’m still getting the hang of this time thing.  I talked it over with some of the other cats in that hotel they had me in when I first came up from Florida.  They explained to me first you’re a kitten and then you’re a cat.  You’re a cat for, like, twenty years, with your muzzle growing whiter each year, and then

your time is up.  I asked how long humans lived and no one had a clue.  Assuming we all live the same number of years, I’m guessing (based on my male human’s gray hair) my humans are around 15 years old, which means in five years I’ve got to find some different humans to be my staff.  Except this pair is going to be in an institution just as soon as some other human gets a load of the tree they’ve planted in the house.

Oh, and after lunch, they started taking all this old stuff out of the boxes and putting it on the tree.  And, I don’t mean just throwing it on the tree.  There must have been six hundred gizmos in those two bins, and every one of them had to go in one certain place.  They even got all misty-eyed when they pulled out stuff.  I’m still getting the hang of human-speak, but they’re all

weepy and reminding each other about where they were when they got each of those gizmos (Harrod’s? Is that a human? A city?) Egypt? Amsterdam? What’s that?

The interesting thing is, every object they put on the tree smells different. I smell different times and places, but they’ve all been together for different lengths of time – as though my humans collected this stuff and saved it just to put on the tree.  How weird is that?

Day 17

This morning, they let me into the room where they keep the tree.  I think I finally get it.  For the first time, I got to really smell the gizmos (my humans call them ‘ornaments’). I smelled three things.  The first is where they came from, which I’ll probably never sort out.  The second thing is that they’ve been on lots of other trees before this one. I smelled a few ornaments that had the scent of more than fifty different trees.  So, this isn’t the first tree my humans have brought into this home.  I figure they bring in new ones – what? – once a year, maybe?

They finally thought they had thrown
enough gizmos on the tree

The third thing was the real eye-opener.  I’m not the first cat to have laid a paw on these ornaments.  Some of the ornaments have been sniffed at by one cat; and some by as many as three. (The three-cat ornaments are really, really old.)

I’ve got a lot to ponder here.  Maybe they haven’t gone completely around the bend.  Maybe this is one more kind of stupid human trick. Whatever it is, I’ll keep an open mind.  As long as the food keeps coming.

Oh, Useful Christmas Tree

At our old home, trees soared
to fouteen feet

I believe in Christmas trees with a zeal only a convert can possess.  Having grown up in South Florida in an era when the idea of flying in fresh-cut Nova Scotia firs was the stuff of science fiction, my family made do with Scotch pines that had already lost half their needles before they appeared the day after Thanksgiving at the Lions Club lot.

Since migrating to New England some 35 years ago, I have become a connoisseur of fresh-cut trees, able to discuss the particular merits of Frasers and concolor firs, balsams, and spruces.  I believed in soaring trees: for 16 years, our trees rose as high as our cathedral ceiling would allow; some years more than 14 feet.  Whatever their height, our trees fill our home with the wonderful scent that only a Christmas tree can bring.

This year's tree had to fit under an 8'
ceiling, but what it lacked in height
it made up for in girth

This Christmas was our first in our new home.  The vaulted ceiling of our old home has been supplanted by an energy-efficient eight-foot one.  So, naturally, we traded height for girth.  The Fraser fir that came into our home on December 18 had branches that stretched an improbable four feet from the trunk at it base, giving the tree an eye-popping circumference of 25 feet.  It took seven strings - 900 lights - to satisfy Betty that there were no gaps in its brilliance.

Our trees are the history of our lives, from my baby shoes and delicate ornaments from the 1930s handed down from Betty’s family, to a wealth of travel mementos repurposed as decorations.  Boxes bearing tiny bells and crystal icicles still bear the name of long-vanished stores - B. Altmans, Woodward & Lothrop - where they were purchased decades ago at prices that seem to be missing a digit.

But a Christmas tree is an ephemeral visitor.  Some friends, especially those with young children, keep their tree lighted beyond Twelfth Night.  In our home, the tree goes up a week before Christmas and comes down on New Year’s Day.  Regardless of the duration, though, the tree must eventually make its exit.

The lower boughs now protect a
slumbering hosta garden, among
other places

For our trees, those two weeks of glory are just a stage in a longer journey.  On the appointed morning after our tree has been ‘de-consecrated’ of its ornamentation but still in its stand in our home, I bring in a pair of sturdy loppers and begin cutting off those lower branches (an enormous sheet of plastic is a necessity). 

The branches are dispersed to insulate perennials and low-growing shrubs.  They offer a layer of protection from unwanted sun and its resulting harmful freeze-thaw cycles.  They lessen the impact of frost heaves and unwelcome animal visitors.  This year, the lower four feet of our tree yielded some 30 branches that were deployed to all corners of our property.  At our old home, we scavenged trees from up and down our street to cover our extensive perennial beds.  As our new garden grows, so may we return to that tradition.

The upper four feet will provide
an avian wind break and shelter

After the lower boughs were removed there remained another lush four feet of tree with thick branches.  We left those on the still-eight-foot trunk and placed the tree at the edge of the wetlands behind us.  Almost all of the trees in our wetlands are deciduous; the lone evergreens are thin white pines.  Our Christmas tree will serve as a refuge for birds seeking shelter from wind, rain, and snow. 

In April, we will collect the fir boughs and take them to our town’s transfer station where they will be chipped into mulch.  A month later, as the remaining fir loses its needles, that remnant, too, will begin its final journey.

A Garden Club Christmas

Something seems to come over garden clubs in December: they suddenly get extraordinarily creative and preternaturally festive.  Last year I wrote about three such club events:  a house tour in Hingham, a Greens Sale in Medfield, and a Festival of Trees in Easton.  This year, Betty’s and my travels took us to several other club events.  Two of them stand out for sheer exuberance. 

Whip Hill in Stoneham

Stoneham, Massachusetts is a beautiful town.  Just eight miles north of the center of Boston, more than a third of the town’s 6.7 square miles is taken up by the Middlesex Fells Reservation and bucolic Spot Pond.  In the 1930s, a local industrialist created an estate on one of the highest points of land in town and built a Tudor-style home.  The estate, Whip Hill, was bequeathed to the town in the late 1960s and the grand house serves as a meeting place for local organizations, including the Stoneham Garden Club. 

Just for the kids, a
tabletop Christmas village

On the second Saturday of each December, the Stoneham Garden Club throws a Christmas party for the town.  The club elaborately decorates several rooms.  There’s a large model railroad village on a tabletop to ‘wow’ the kids.  Warm apple cider and Christmas cookies are doled out by the hundreds.  Best of all, one room is given over to a Kris Kringle who is a dead ringer for Edmund Gwynn.  The line to see Santa stretches for a hundred feet, and every kid gets not just a lollipop, but enough quality time with the Big Guy to be assured that their wish list will get a fair hearing back at the North Pole.

Betty with club officers Bernie Diluzio 
(left) and Connie Filosi (right)

You’re probably thinking that this is a terrific fund raiser.  And, it probably would be except that there’s no charge (although donations are accepted for the cookies).  This is the club’s present to the residents of Stoneham.  And, when we were there, Whip Hill was overflowing with visitors.  It is a wonderful tradition.

Oh, and it isn’t the only way that the club ‘gives back’ to the community.  After an ice dam caused extensive damage to the beautiful antique pine floors in two rooms at Whip Hill, the Stoneham Garden Club picked up the check for refinishing the floors.

A good tour book helps everyone
navigate unfamiliar territory

A day later, we were in Littleton, Massachusetts for the 2015 installment of the Littleton Country Gardeners’ Holiday House Tour.  Decorated houses are a fund-raising staple for garden clubs.  The trick is to find between five and ten homeowners who do a great job of decorating and are willing to open their houses to total strangers for a day (the other trick is to have an incantation that will ensure good weather).

Littleton has a wonderfully active garden club that maintains 13 ‘wayside gardens’ around the community and has undertaken the replanting of gardens on the town common as well as at the town hall.  There’s a fresh floral arrangement each week at the town library. That’s just part of how the club serves its exurban community of 9,000, 26 miles northwest of the Financial District.  The Holiday House Tour helps defray the cost of those good works. 

An India-themed tree
(double-click for a full screen)

A good tour starts with a good program book.  Littleton’s provides an easy-to-follow map with a paragraph-long synopsis of what makes the decorations interesting and, where appropriate, a history of the house (one of the homes on the tour dates to 1780).  The Littleton program also includes a photo of the house’s exterior to help identify the location.

Every good tour should have at least one home where the owner or owners pull out all the stops.  A home on Goldsmith Street in Littleton fit that description to a tee.  She starts decorating in October.  From the outside, the home is a pleasant, sprawling 1930s Cape.  In the inside, it is Christmas in every room and it is glorious.  Every flat surface in the home is occupied by a tree, a Santa, a village, carolers, or some other reminder of the holiday.  

How about a post office-themed Christmas tree?  There was one, and if I looked long enough for the right kind of ornaments, I could probably replicate that tree.  But how about a tree with a theme of India?  I marveled at a tree overflowing with elephants, Hindu goddesses, peacocks… you name it and, if it had anything to do with India, it was on tree.  I asked the homeowner how many times she had been to India.  “Never,” she said.  “I just saw a few ornaments and went on from there.” 

A good house tour should also include an informative and talkative host.  At that circa-1780 house, the homeowner was more than pleased to take us on a guided tour of the downstairs, starting with the core historic building and then showing us how the colonial-era elements were preserved and incorporated into an attractive, modern home.  And our personalized tour, of course, was held amid a very beautifully Christmas-decorated home.

Why were the fireplace logs numbered?

The other thing I look for in a house tour is a ‘why-didn’t-I-think-of-that?’ moment, and I found it at a log home on Foster Street.  Amid a home filled with eclectic collections, I encountered a firewood rack filled with foot-long pine logs next to a fireplace.  Nothing unusual there, except that these logs all bore hand-written inscriptions like ’97 and ’99.

Baffled, I asked the homeowner if she could explain the meaning of the numbers on the logs.  She explained that, each year, the family purchased a 14-foot-tall tree for their cathedral-ceilinged family room.  And, each year, when the tree came down, they cut off the bottom-most foot of the tree and inscribed the date.  It was their way of keeping a little piece of each Christmas so that they could enjoy it for years to come. 

Now why didn’t I think of that?

Oh, Christmas Tree – the 2013 Edition

Putting up the Sanders Family Christmas Tree is always a complex operation, and this year’s production is no different. 

First, there is the search for the tree.  Then, there is bringing the tree home.  After that, there is the storing of the tree until the proper date, after which comes placing the tree in the stand.  Finally, there is the decorating of the tree.  None of these are simple tasks where the Sanders Family Christmas Tree is concerned.

The tree comes into the house.
That's 'The Lemon Drop Kid'
playing in the background.
Double-click on any of these
photos for a slideshow.

I should interject a little background for the unwary reader.  Mine is a mixed marriage.  Betty is a born-and-bred New Yorker from the Finger Lakes, where horse-drawn sleighs drag magnificent, fresh-cut firs through crisp, fresh-fallen snow to homes on Christmas Eve.  I am a native Floridian and my circa-1957 vision of the pathetic, parched, brown-needled Scotch pines that slumped listlessly against fences in Kiwanis-Club-operated lots in my hometown is permanently seared in memory. 

This is a drawing on an
egg of our first house, 
a brownstone in Brooklyn

In the Finger Lakes, multiple generations of a family gather around a roaring fire to roast chestnuts before going out to skate on frozen ponds.  In Miami, we picked up a couple of #2 Christmas dinners at the drive-through window at Bubi’s on our way to the beach.

Betty has always been a true believer.  She only had to give me a taste of the Real Thing to bring me around.  I cut my first Christmas tree in 1974 on a tree farm north of Albany with Betty as my guide to distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ trees.  It was a revelation.  I was hooked.  I saw the light, and there no greater zealot in the Christmas Tree Universe than a convert. 

A decided mix of cultures: at
lower left, a Ukranian egg from
our days in Chicago; at center,
an Indian on an elephant; one
of Betty's parent's ornaments
from the 1940s.

This year, we began scouting Christmas trees before Thanksgiving and made an exploratory visit to our first lot soon thereafter.  For several years – at the height of my mania – we traveled fifty miles to southern Rhode Island to cut fourteen-foot behemoths at Big John Leyden’s Tree Farm (inexplicably, there are no cut-your-own tree farms in Boston – go figure).  Going to Big John’s involved borrowing a truck and spending upwards of three hours finding ‘the right’ tree.  And, while the cost of the tree was a very reasonable $35, the gas involved made the excursion less of a bargain.  And, Big John eventually ran out of fourteen-foot Fraser firs, plus Betty put her foot down that we would never again devote two solid days just to getting a tree to stand up straight.

There's something for
everyone on the tree

We found this year’s tree at Weston Nurseries, a nine-plus-foot Fraser fir that smelled like the Great North Woods.  It was baled and placed atop our car for the fifteen-mile drive home. That was on December 8.  We do not, however, put up our tree until exactly one week before Christmas, and I am unable to fathom why putting up trees – real or artificial – in late November has become both commonplace and acceptable.  To me, a tree has a two-week engagement where it occupies center stage in a house.  It should go up on December 18 while an appropriate Christmas movie or three plays in the background and come down while watching the Rose Parade on HGTV.

The density of ornaments
reflects travel and eclectic tastes.

Once home, we un-baled the tree and parked it in our woods to regain its proper form.  This involved cutting a fresh bottom, standing the tree up in a tub of water, and securing it at four points to nearby trees.  Tying ropes in sub-freezing weather is not fun but we accomplished the feat in a little under an hour.  There, the tree stood for eight days, which included one bout of snow and sleet. 

On Monday, though, there was a warning for a fresh three-to-six inches of the white stuff the following day and we thought it unwise to carry a snow-encrusted tree into the house.  So, we cleared a space in the garage and devoted two hours to anchoring the tree to the railing of one of our garage doors while tying the base of the tree to the other railing so the tree could not kick out and hit a car.  Elapsed time:  ninety minutes. 

Then, late Tuesday afternoon, after the tree had shed its accumulation of snow (and while heavy snow fell outside), we carried it into the house.  We must be getting better at placing trees in stands (it requires an extremely heavy-duty stand to accommodate a tree of our size and girth) because we got it standing perfectly straight on the first try.  We tightened the tree in its stand.  We also deploy a pair of guy wires to augment the stand because, in years past, cats had gotten inspired to scale the tree in search of whatever it is cats climb trees to find.

A koala from Australia, an angel,
an ornate ceramic egg and my
drawing of our Stamford home.

Once guy-wired, we inspected the tree one last time.  It was magnificent, with a circumference at its base of more than twenty-five feet.  It was perfect… except that it was facing the wrong way.  And so, with guy wires removed, I wiggled my way into the tree and picked it up in its stand, slowly rotating a hundred-pound tree (plus stand) one hundred and eighty degrees. Guy wires were re-attached.  Miraculously, the tree was still straight.  Elapsed time:  two hours.

Tuesday evening, we added nine hundred lights.  Wednesday, we started decorating.

It is decorating a tree that is the true joy of having one.  Opening each box of ornaments is a voyage of discovery through time and space.  There are the tiny vases we acquired in Greece and the prayer balls from Japan.  There are matched glass lamps from Harrod’s in London and terra cotta jugs from Sorrento.  There is a tiny Champagne bottle from old friends in Virginia and one of my baby shoes. 

Box after box is opened and memories are unleashed:  tiny koalas from Australia and a carved tiger in a Santa cap from the San Diego Zoo; crystal icicles we bought on sale after Christmas at B. Altman in the late 1970s and delicate ornaments from the 1940s that graced Betty’s tree when she was a girl.  Hand-painted Ukrainian eggs from our days in Chicago and a Russian one featuring a red fox framed against a snowy night from a street fair in Augusta, Georgia.

The finished tree.
Merry Christmas!

There are more than 600 ornaments in all (a computerized list keeps track of each one and its origin).  We add a few new ornaments each year; both ones we are given and ones we acquire.  Sadly, a few become too delicate to use and so are taken out, admired, and returned to storage.

This is our ritual.  Christmas means many things to different people.  For me, the tree is a symbol of both timeless and evolution; of change and of constancy.  I look at the decorated tree and I see a diorama of my life preserved in precious bundles each weighing a few ounces.

Christmas trees come but once a year, but the enchantment is eternal.

Oh, Christmas Tree

I grew up in Miami which is Christmas tree hell unless you consider decorated Norfolk Island pines to be festive. Back when I was a kid, as nearly as I can reconstruct events, a truck that probably left Nova Scotia sometime in August made its way down U.S. 1, shedding needles all the way, finally dumping a load of scorched Scotch pines in supermarket parking lots around the city on Thanksgiving day. We would go to a lot in our town, run by the Lions Club, and pick out a pathetic, five-foot-tall specimen. Its remaining needles would be brown long before Christmas Day, let alone New Years. (It should go without saying that this was long before Harry and David would ship you a fresh tree overnight.)

One of the benefits of moving north was to discover the joys of cutting a fresh tree and discovering that Fraser firs smell different than Balsams and that long-needled pines have plusses and minuses. Having been deprived of such things for so many years, I have sort of gone overboard for the past few decades, opting for ever-larger specimens. In Virginia, I once unceremoniously landed in a mud wallow trying to pull a ten-foot-diameter tree through a baler.

In Massachusetts, presented with the unlimited potential of an 18-foot-high ceiling in one room, I confess I went wild. (Although it must be pointed out that I was ‘enabled’ by Betty who, though she is a native New Yorker, is no less enamored of fresh trees.) We would make a day of it; hiking for hours across a hundred acres of trees arranged by type. To me, it was heaven.

Our tallest topped out at more than 14 feet, had a 25-foot circumference and was steadied by three guy wires to keep it upright in a stand that was seriously over its rated capacity. We found the tree in southern Rhode Island, 70 miles distant, and brought it home in a borrowed pickup truck, the tree strapped to and overhanging both ends of the truck. Rumbling up I-95, our truck with its cargo bore an uncanny resemblance to a Boeing 747 ferrying the Space Shuttle.

This year, we are in Giant Christmas Tree withdrawal. Because of a back injury, cutting our own tree was not a realistic option. Instead, we perused a lot in our town (run by the Lions Club, naturally) as well as commercial ventures that spring up for a few weeks each December. Further, we agreed ahead of time that decorating a tree off of a pair of eight-foot ladders as we have done in past years was not in the cards. Our 2009 tree would be no taller than eight feet.

What I discovered was that a) cut Christmas trees look a heck of a lot better than they did fifty years ago, and b) the cost ranges from reasonable to astronomical. Big John’s, the cut-your-own tree farm in Rhode Island that has been our source of yuletide greenery the past two years, charges $35 for any tree. Add in gas money and the price is still under $50 for that ideal tree, regardless of size.

The starting price for trees in the Lions lot was $45 for short-needled balsams that were guaranteed to start shedding needles as soon as we strapped it to our car. Fraser firs, our preferred trees, were $65 and up. A seven-foot one was $85 and had a gaping hole in one side.. While five dollars of the purchase price went to the Medfield Food Cupboard, we thought the cost too high.

We had heard that trees at Home Depot were fresh and realistically priced. Realistically priced, yes, but still packed so tightly from shipping that we felt we were choosing a dehydrated specimen to which we would need to add water. We passed. A ‘family’ tree lot in an adjacent town offered Bruce Springsteen carols (I had no idea) and great trees… for a hundred dollars. We passed again.

Our fallback position had always been to drive down to Big John’s and avail ourselves of one of the fresh-cut specimens they keep on hand for those in a hurry. Last Sunday morning we packed tea and cookies for the trip south but thought we’d stop at one more seasonal lot that appeared to have a large selection and a big turnover. To our amazement (and my wife’s back’s relief), we spotted a seven-foot Fraser fir that had no holes and looked quite fresh. And, at $40, it was more than fairly priced.

The tree is now tied up in our side yard, its branches fully extended. It isn’t as wide as one we’d cut for ourselves, but I’ve looked at it from every angle and I can’t find a hole or a bad spot. On Friday, as is our custom, the tree will be decorated. And, unlike previous years’ trees, this one won’t need guy wires to prevent a cat-induced tree felling.