Christmas Icicles and a Cardboard Star



 I always looked forward to Christmas as a child because there was a special adventure in store for me.  Grandpa Riddle would take me to a neighboring pasture in search of a Christmas tree.  Christmas tree lots were unheard of back in the 50's in our small town, so you either went to someone's pasture or you could buy one of those fake aluminum ones sold at Kress's in Fort Smith.

Grandpa would load up his axe, some rope and a shovel in his 1951 brown and white Chevy and we would drive out to someone's pasture to look for a tree for Christmas.  We didn't chop down any big trees like Clark Griswold did in Christmas Vacation nor was there 10 feet of snow on the ground.  The trees we always chopped down were five feet or smaller, and were more comparable to a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree.  We also hunted for holly berries and I would pick as many berries as my pockets would hold so Grandma and I could string them for garland.  Once we got home Grandpa would saw the bottom of the tree trunk to make it flat, and then he'd take two short boards to build a wooden stand in the shape of an "X" (just like Charlie Brown's).

Sometimes I made a colorful chain from construction paper for garland, and to top it all off, Grandma made a perfect five-point star cut from cardboard and covered it with pieces of tin foil.  We kept that star year after year.  Just last Christmas I was telling my daughter about the tin foil star, and she and Stephanie, her stepdaughter, decided to create their own cardboard, foil-covered star, but they got their star pattern from the Internet!  It turned out really beautiful and Stephanie decorated it with colorful beads.  I always had one very old string of electric lights, but they never worked.  I was lucky if they stayed lit for a minute or two, so for the sparkle effect, I always bought one box of icicles every year from Miss Emma's Variety Store downtown.  However, one year I was too late in getting to the Variety Store and Miss Emma sold out of icicles early in the season and said she wouldn't be ordering any more.  I was genuinely disappointed and cried all the way home. 

Grandma always saved the papers that came wrapped around the tobacco in Grandpa's Prince Albert tobacco cans. She said maybe I could cut them into icicles.  The papers were shiny foil on one side and white on the reverse.  I loved to find those papers and smell that wonderful aroma left by the tobacco.  While Grandma strung popcorn and berries for the garland, I remember meticulously cutting Prince Albert tobacco papers into icicles for the tree. I bent each one on the very end so they would stay on the branches.  Try to picture in your mind--we have a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree with a cardboard, foil-covered star, garland chain made from construction paper, a few red berries and popcorn for extra garland, lights that would only come on if you jiggled them just right, and now the "piece de re'sistance",  icicles made from Prince Albert tobacco papers scattered throughout.   Wow!  Is this imaginative or what?  No, this is what you do when if the variety store is out of icicles.

My cousin, Brenda, made fun of it--she always made fun of things I did, but never in front of Grandma.  I was always extremely jealous of her Christmas trees because she had fancy lights that bubbled and sparkly icicles.

I didn't appreciate it at the time, but I realize now how much it meant to me that Grandma and I spent all day making those decorations, and equally special to me that Grandpa took me to find a Christmas tree out in that pasture every year.  This is such a great memory to me--one I shall never forget, especially those icicles made from Prince Albert tobacco papers.