When I was a child, I thought all Christmas trees around me were wrong. They didn’t look like the Christmas trees I saw in old American textbooks: A small pine tree decorated with balls, ribbons, candy canes, and emerging from a pile of gifts that eager blonde kids gathered around it and started to unpack as their parents watch with contentment.
Instead, the Christmas trees I often saw as a child were more like modern art assemblages or junk sculptures: A cone made of strings tied to a pole from a circular base. A dead branch wrapped in cotton “snow”. A silver tree made from milk cans cut into strips and twisted to make them look like branches. A piece of cardboard cut into the shape of a pine tree and painted green.
My mother made all of these kinds of Christmas trees except for the metal can type which can be a hazard in a house with kids running around. The making and decorating of a tree used to be a family activity. Everyone had to do his or her part in its construction.
Decorations were like kindergarten projects with materials derived from the surroundings. Toy plastic balls were wrapped in colored tying straw or cellophane secured with a pin and dotted with sequins or beads. Poinsettia flowers and ribbons were made of crepe paper or metallic plastic sheets. Real candies were hung and, in poorer communities, fake ice candies were hung using plastic filled with colored water.
Whatever was the Christmas tree, it always had a belen or nativity scene at the base, which served as the highlight of the decorative piece. Usually, this was a pop-up belen made of cardboard one could buy very cheaply from even the sari-sari store. But some people made their own cut-out version of cardboard and painted it with house paint or cheap watercolor and a Chinese brush.
I loved to add toy soldiers or animals to our belen, as if they too came to visit or guard the Child Jesus. Some of them I hung from branches of the Christmas tree with a string. The plastic soldiers would look like they were rappelling from heaven towards the manger.
Series lights were expensive so those who could not afford them used everything that glittered as decoration. Metallic plastic was cut into stars or snowflakes. Even the silver or gold foil in candy and cigarette wrappers was cut into little stars and glued on the branches or base of the Christmas tree.
I didn’t see plastic Christmas trees until the early ‘80s when the first department store opened in our hometown. Displayed there were imported Christmas trees encircled with glittering series lights and decorated with shiny plastic balls, bells, candy canes, and everything else ready-made.
The imported plastic Christmas trees resembled my idea of the perfect Christmas tree that, according to the textbook illustration, should be placed near the fireplace and daddy’s big couch. Compared to this ideal, everything else around me seemed poor copies or rather crude handmade monstrosities.
Everyone seemed to think the same and suddenly, as imported Chinese-made Christmas trees and decorative items became more and more affordable, the local handicraft versions went out of style. My mother, however, continues up to now to use dried up tree branches sold at the market. She would adorn them with a combination of decorations bought from the department store and those she made herself.
Nowadays, with the steady influx of cheap products, including plastic Christmas trees, from China, it’s more convenient to just buy one than make your own. In fact, I don’t know how many of us still make their own Christmast tree, lantern, or belen.
I guess even in the United States, Chinese-made Christmas trees have replaced the traditional pine tree branch cut from the forest. In the first place, it’s much cheaper than American-made artificial Christmas trees. In the second place, it’s already politically incorrect to use a real pine tree for a Christmas tree.
And so, the archetypal Christmas tree which became the centerpiece of family gathering in that book illustration could well be a plastic one made in China.
We have one kept in a box somewhere. Still, I somehow miss the imperfect Christmas trees of my childhood. Now, I don’t know which one is a worse monstrosity.