A Christmas Story

In 1942, I was seven years old. My sister Marilyn, who was eleven at the time, took care of my brother and I while my mother worked. My father and mother were no longer married.

It was near Christmas time and Marilyn said we are going to have a Christmas tree this year. So, we took an ax and went into the woods near our house. We found a little black jack oak tree with leaves on it and Marilyn cut it down. We put it in a coffee can and filled it up with sandy dirt, the type of soil we had in Texas where we lived. (We lived in Olney, close to where the trailer park is now.)

I said to Marilyn, what are we going to put on the tree? She said, “we will make ornaments out of the bottom of cans and glue pictures on them.” So, we cut pictures from a Montgomery Ward catalog and Marilyn made some glue from flour and water to paste the pictures with. We punched a hole in them with an ice pick to run a string through to hang them. We then made a paper chain from strips of paper cut from the catalog and glued them together. We wrapped the chain around the tree and hung the ornaments. Our tree was complete.

That was the only Christmas tree I had as a child. We worked all day putting it together. What fun it was!