The Pine Tree--No, not HCA

     JAN. 2, 2014, I took our Christmas Tree down.  We've had a Christmas tree in the same place every year since 1969, when our house was built.  I have undecorated it and/or taken it down every year except for 1976, the Christmas before Danny was born.  The following Christmas that year found the ornaments in a heap in the big cardboard containment box, with the original boxes thrown in on top.  The horror!  So every year thereafter, I would wait until the kids went back to school, and would carefully put the ornaments back in their boxes.  I always felt a sense of loss--after all the joy and excitement of the kids' playing  with and hanging on the tree the ornamental figurines their grandmother would send each Christmas, and awaiting the gifts Santa would leave beneath the tree, the tree was done with, nothing left but memories and the hope that the happiness of Christmas would return for another year, though each passing year brought with it a little less of the magic of childhood, and a little more awareness of the transient nature of what we view as happiness.
    On three separate  occasions over the years, the trees were taken down by default.  In other words, the trees fell down.  Fortunately, each time was after Christmas Day.
    The first time, David was a baby and I was feeding him a bottle in the rocking chair by the tree, when suddenly without any provocation the tree fell right on us.  A rather full and bushy tree that year, as I recall.  The hardwood floor was still bare of  any carpeting or rug, so the ornaments had a hard landing. Our supply of ornaments was only a few years old, and right out of the box(es), the kids still too young to have contributed any of the crafty little doodads that were to come later.  We had 4 boxes of ornaments: round red balls, green balls, red and green swirled balls, and a box of 6 long blue cylindrical ornaments.  After the fall, just about half of each box was broken. 
    The downfall of the second tree happened several years later, when Marilyn and David were in school, Danny still unborn.  I was home alone, in the shower, when I heard a crash.  I grabbed a towel and ran into the living room where the tree was lying flat on the floor with Roger the cat still enmeshed in its branches.  She had never bothered with it before, or after, and she lived with us for 15 years, but something that one day must have caught her interest.  Again, breakage of more ornaments, but I didn't bother with the inventory that time. 
  The third time the tree fell was only a few years ago, either last year or the year before.  Louise was here and Ben and Greg, who had been sitting beneath the tree playing games, had just left their positions and were heading out the door when the tree crashed down and onto the coffee table, spewing ornaments across the (now carpeted) floor.  Not too much breakage, but the set of small silvery delicate ornaments that Dorothy had recently given me suffered the most loss.  Besides being delicate, and for that reason, they'd been hung at the top of the tree, and so were most vulnerable.  I still have 3 of them left.
    The usual tree-felling sadness didn't impact me so greatly this year, my emotions mostly "sapped" by now.  I put all the ornaments carefully back in their time-worn packaging, and into the large multi-duct-taped master box, and brought it out  to the attic entrance.  Then I tackled the tree and dragged it out the front door and into the snow.  I tried not to conjure up the memory of Hans Christian's Andersen's Pine Tree.  Anthropomorphism goes only so far.