Note: This is one of the reasons I like hanging out with my grandma -- she has some good stories. And often, they capture something essential about life, that I've been studying in the abstract. In this case, it's the permaculture insight, "The Problem Is The Solution."

A Christmas Tree for a Dollar
An Enid Ritter story as told to Erica Ritter

Since Ray was a civil engineer, working on various jobs from year to year, the family moved around a lot. It seemed like every other Christmas, we were in a different house.

Christmas 1955 was the first one we spent in our own house, built and paid for. We called it “the little house;” it was tiny. We had been living in a larger house, outside the city, but Ray needed to live with his family inside the city limits in order to keep a job he had then, working for the city of Portland. So we packed up once again, and moved into “the little house.” Ray’s brother Oscar had been living in it, renting it from Ray, so he stayed on too… until our oldest boy, Philip, got sick and stayed up half one night screaming. The next day Oscar found himself someplace else to stay, “temporarily.”

Six of us in that house, including the baby, was still a crowd. Paul and Philip would have been seven and eight years old, and Ardath three. Ardath had to go back to sleeping in her six-year crib, which she resented (having been out of it for a while, enjoying the privilege of a “big bed.”) But four big beds wouldn’t fit in the one bedroom. The big boys slept on army-cot bunk-beds, next to baby Rusty’s crib as well as Ardath’s. Three bureaus were stacked in a cluster along one wall, and a shelf with a curtain hanging from it made a sort of closet over the back of Ardath’s bed.

The main room was intended to become a garage, eventually; it was a longish room, about ten feet by twenty. It sounds big enough, but there was a heating apparatus against one wall in the middle that sort of divided it up. The sofa-bed where Ray and I slept, and the necessary bedroom furniture, had to go in the front corners of the room. During the day, the bed became a couch to make room for the front entry-way. A bathinet stood in the back corner, and a washing machine beside the back door; the kitchen opened off on the other side of the back door. It’s amazing how much we managed to fit into that one room. I had just about got everything organized, when it came time for Christmas.

Where in the world were we going to fit a Christmas tree? I talked about getting a little tree, but the kids wanted “a big tree like we always had,” – at least, the few years they could remember. I joked about hanging it from the ceiling, which alarmed the kids still further – they wanted a Normal Tree, Just Like Always!

We went out to the lot, me carrying the baby, Philip and Ardath and Paul insisting passionately on “a big tree from floor to ceiling.” Ray didn’t have to mention (because we all knew) that he didn’t like paying any more than a dollar for any Christmas tree. (As a good ol’ Wisconsin back-woods boy, paying good money for greenery always got his back up.) The fact that we’d never yet found a tree for less than five dollars didn’t seem to make any difference. He didn’t figure they deserved that much money – regardless of any work they spend planting and trimming and cutting and hauling the trees.

The trouble with having precocious kids is, they take matters out of your hands. We rolled up to the Christmas Tree lot, and Paul and Ardath spilled out the whole story – “We want a Christmas tree, and Daddy won’t pay over a dollar (and it makes Momma mad)!” I was so fed up with this routine, by this point, that I must have looked pitiful, holding my baby and rolling my eyes. I was Not Smiling.

The salesman was at the end of a long day, with hard-to-please customers of all kinds. I think he may have been making fun of Ray’s stinginess when he said, “I’ll show you what kind of tree you can get for a dollar.” He reached into his greens-pile, and pulled out half a tree. (One side looked like a perfect tree, but there was nothing on the other – just a trunk and a few twigs, where the main branches had broken off.)

He was startled at how overjoyed we were. I said, “Oh, that’s perfect! We can put that right between the washer and the bassinet!” It was big, too: once we put the star on, it reached right up to the ceiling.

The man at the lot seemed surprised, but I don’t think he regretted the deal. He reached into the pile and found the main branch that had been broken off, and threw it in as well, all for a dollar.