As a young boy I used every means to make money.Besides my large paper route I used our horse and dump cart to haul ashes and shore coal. For this I gleaned dollars which I kept between the pages of on of Dads Eng1neer books. Around this time of the year Dad and I would go to the woods a cut Xmas trees, I do not think we knew who owned to land or trees as the coal company seemed to own just about everything.
We used a horse and sled and would pile 8 or 10 trees on and return home where we stood them in the snow. People would order the trees through Dad and we would deliver them and sometimes make a wooden stand for the customer. We would charge $2 for a regular tree and $3 for large ones. As these trees were not the tree farm variety they never seemed that good when we got home. They looked fine in the bush.
One Christmas we had a good year and must have sold 20 or more. We were always left with a few to choose from for our house. This particular year on the evening we were to trim our tree Dad brought in the best one of the rejects. All of us were very upset at the look of this squiggly, ugly Charlie Brown Tree.
Not to be too upsetting to the family Dad went to the garage and brought back a brace and bit, a spoke shave and a small saw. The piece of art began by Dad also bringing in another tree. He would drill a hole in the ugly tree, cut off a branch from the second tree and trim the end and shove it into the drilled hole. All this with 10 pairs of eyes on the operation. Branch after branch was added until Dad stood up the made over tree and it was perfect in our eyes. We all showed our appreciation by expressing our feelings with superlatives. Best expressed by our youngest who declared it the most beautiful tree she ever saw.
That year we had a special Christmas as it was the last year we were all together as a family.It was 1948, the year of the miners strike and the Year my sister went away to Teachers College in Truro. Best of all it showed once again how our Father could do anything he put his mind to. He was amazing.
This story could bring a tear to a glass eye. What a wonderful Christmas memory ... and I have a feeling we have one or two of our own regarding putting up the Scotch pine tree in our basement!
ReplyDeleteI agree! What a perfect Christmas story ... and what terrific creative and resourceful genes he passed along! Have a great Christmas :)
ReplyDeletewcn
It is a great story of a good memory. My father is gone now ten years and I reach back for things that I remember that were good, compared to the finish of his life.
ReplyDelete