Lawrence Hall
The Rural Electric
Co-Op’s Giant Christmas Tree
Christmas trees are a delight to a child, and when a man is
old and can be a child again, even more delightful.
Our family’s farm was about three miles from town. We lived
in what would now be called situational poverty, but most folks in the county
were worse off. Some kids got bicycles for Christmas, for us it was socks and cap
pistols and little tinplate toy trucks, and for many there was almost nothing.
The post-war prosperity boom bypassed most of East Texas.
A few weeks before Christmas each year Father took us boys
into the woods next to our land for the adventure of cutting the Christmas
tree. In our informal squirrel hunts in the autumn we had scouted out likely
trees, and now returned for the best of them, almost always a pine. Finding it, cutting it down with the hatchet,
and dragging it back to the house through the chill was a great adventure to be
savored then and savored now in the remembrance.
Father stood the tree in a bucket of wet sand and anchored
it with fishing line. He and Mother strung the big Noma™ lights and hung the
precious glass ornaments, and then we children were at last given a box of
tinsel each and permitted to fling the bright strands any way we wanted. What a
mess! I realize now that after we went to bed Mother discreetly arranged the
tinsel a little more artistically.
Farms in our school readers and in the movies were always
bright and cheerful places, with happy cows and happy pigs living peaceful lives
of prelapsarian fellowship. In reality a farm, especially in the winter, is
brown and grey and mucky and smelly, and after their years of loyal service
cows are prodded into a trailer, bellowing in fear, to be driven away to the
slaughterhouse. Good ol’ Bessie, whom you raised from a calf, is now lunch.
Life on a farm is often grim.
Thus, a little pine strung with multi-colored lights and
little figures and globes brought out once a year was magic.
Another magic Christmas tree was the huge one the local
electric co-op built each year by stringing lights on their tall radio mast –
tall enough to have red lights all year round lest the town doctor fly his
airplane into it.
For weeks the far-away tree shone across the dark, frosty fields.
A child imagined it to be a magic place, maybe even the North Pole itself.
Now the tower is gone, replaced by cell ‘phones and more
modern radios, and the co-op decorates only a little tree out in front of the
drive-by window. Still, it’s a Christmas tree, and good enough.
For Christmas the co-op gives employees, retirees, trustees,
and others ham for Christmas. Because I serve on the scholarship committee I
get a ham, which is not a Christmas tree but then you can’t eat a Christmas
tree.
Scholarships for graduating seniors, Christmas hams for
some, electricity for all, and a pretty good Christmas tree out front. What a
wonderful institution our Rural Electric Co-Op is!
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