Cecelia & The Plastic Tree
b"I feel like I am now preparing for Santa's visit, by installing a parking meter on the roof by the chimney. I bought an artificial Christmas tree. The Fed Ex guy just brought it. It's not like the traditional aluminum tree. This one is genuine green plastic. With the lights already installed. I don't know if I should have done it. For the last couple of years, we bought small trees that were growing in little pots. We planted them outside after New Years, and they both promptly died. Not what we had in mind. As a perspective, I worked at NBC radio for years. The studios were in the RCA Building at Rock Center in NY...right behind the Rock Center Christmas tree. We used to walk right under the tree to go to work every night. My Lady Wonder Wench was in favor of having a tree roughly that size of our own each year. Needless to say, that didn't quite work out either. We cut down our own trees a couple of years. Those were the years that I lifted our daughter Kris up on my shoulders so she could put our special star on top. That was fun. But I always hated to see the tree die after a few weeks in our living room.\\n\\tI think I'm making too much out of the fact that we have an artificial tree this year. I hope so. I'm a grandfather now and I remember my grandfather's Christmas trees. He had electric lights, but he also had some real candles on his tree. It was a Christmas tradition that we'd gather around the tree...the whole family. He lit the candles and we all sang Silent Night. One verse in English and the second verse in the original German. We called my grandfather Grosspop. He left his home in Germany when he saw Hitler coming. He wasn't having any part of that. He was proud to be an American citizen. And he was just as proud of his German traditions. So we sang Silent night, holy night and then Stille Nacht, heilige nacht while the candles burned. Then he'd count to three and everybody would blow out the candles and he'd turn on the electric lights."