Aluminum Christmas Trees & Such

Art's entry today about Christmas trees brought back lots of memories. But first I have to tell you about the cookie baking marathon that took place at our house last night.

Ole loves to mess around in the kitchen (I'm so lucky), so he decided he was going to help me out by doing a bunch of cookie baking. Lars, (Lovely Daughter's fiance) had told me previously that he wanted to be in on this event because he had never baked cookies before, let alone Christmas cookies. I think he must have led a sheltered life where he grew up (a suburb of Los Angeles) because there's lots of these kinds of things he hasn't done before. So I called Lars and he trotted on over, washed his hands and dug in.

I set the guys up to bake Swedish spritz. I have my Grandmother's old recipe and they melt in your mouth. Plus I had purchased a new cookie gun last year, which is much easier to use that the old screw tube kind that I used to used.

First they made a batch of the regular almond flavored cookies in all different shapes. Then they decided they wanted to make the next batch colorful. I checked my food coloring and only had red, yellow and blue - no green. So they stirred up another batch of dough and started experimenting with color. First they put in red and decided to push it a bit farther and put in blue. Well, of course they ended up with a beautiful, rich purple. I told them if they were making Easter eggs it would have been perfect, but purple wasn't exactly a good Christmas color.

Lars was having a good time shooting cookies out of the gun. When all was said and done I packed all the cookies into containers and sent him out the door with one to bring to work this morning. Lovely Daughter called a bit ago and said that Lars had been passing cookies around his office and the ladies were RAVING about them - how wonderful they tasted and how perfectly shaped they were. "How do you get them to look so nice? My cookies are never shaped this nice." Lars' response, "Oh, I just have a knack for it!" Of course he didn't tell them he'd never baked cookies before in his life!! Way to go Lars.

I'm going to the store today to lay in supplies for more spritz, various other kinds of cookies and fudge. This time I'll make sure I have green food coloring and some of those sprinkles and some red hots. Lars says he wants to make cut out cookies and decorate them. We're supposed to have bad weather this weekend, so it will be a good weekend to be doing those kinds of things.

Art wrote about aluminum Christmas trees in his post today. They're worth a ton of money these days if you have an original one from back in the 50s and 60s. I often wonder what happened to the one we had when I was a kid. I remember you couldn't string lights on it because of possible electrical hazards, so we just decorated ours with blue balls and ribbons and then of course had to turn the rotating color wheel on it so it would look all different colors.

Don't I look cool with that space-age Christmas tree?

Then there was the year when Lovely Daughter was about 4 or 5 and we were going to have a BIG REAL tree. We have a cathedral ceiling in our living room - the high side is about 12 feet high. So we decided we'd go out to the farm where Ole spent his summers with Aunt Mary and Uncle Henry and cut a tree down from the woods.

Let me tell you, they look a LOT smaller when they're out in the woods than they do when you get them in the living room. We walked and walked through the snow and the woods to find THE perfect tree, all fat and found and bushy. Loaded it into the pickup and it stuck out of the back of the box by several feet. That should have been the clue right there, Folks, that this tree was going to be too frickin' big to put in our living room. Somehow we managed to get that fat tree into the living room but couldn't get it set up because it was way too tall for the 12 foot side of the room. I think Ole cut about 4 feet off the bottom just in order to get it upright. THEN we had to cut branches off two of the sides to get it to fit in the corner because it was so fat. Without trimming the branches off two sides to fit into the corner, it stuck out so far into the room there was no room for any furniture!! When we finally got it situated we didn't have a tree stand that was big enough to hold the tree trunk. I don't remember what we did to overcome that, but I remember we finally got the tree upright and decorated and decided that the next year we'd go buy a 5 footer!! You can't imagine how many needles a tree that size can shed!!

There have been many other stories about Christmas trees over the years. There's the year we lived in Iceland and had to order our tree in June to be shipped in onto the NATO base because Iceland has no trees of any kind. The tree was so dry by the time we got it in December that it was amazing it had any needles on it at all. Christmas Eve morning I was vacuuming and bumped the tree and ALL of the needles fell off. All I had was a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. So I raced down to the local hardware store and bought the only green plastic tree they had. There were others - one white, one aluminum and one pink, but this was the only green tree. I paid $40 for it - $40 that we just didn't have to spend, and Ole blew his stocking cap off when he found that out. But we had that tree for almost 20 years before we got rid of it.

We've used artificial trees for the most part over the years, although once in a while interspersed were real trees. Ole's always been a believer in REAL trees, but he's given up fussing about the fake ones because he doesn't like cleaning up all the needles any more than I do.

Now we've graduated to one of those trees that has fiber optics woven in with the needles, and has a color wheel in the base that turns and the fiber optics change color.

Do you see history repeating itself here? I do.

Art also was wondering what the screwiest Christmas gift was that you received. I don't know if it's the screwiest or the worst but it definitely falls into that category, and not so much the gift itself, but because of who I got it from. When we lived in Iceland we hadn't been married very long. The first Christmas we were there my mother-in-law sent me a pair of leopard-skin pajamas with FEET in them!! I've always wondered what kind of a point she was trying to make (snicker).

Okay now - let's continue this. What's the screwiest, dumbest or worst Christmas present you've ever received?

If I do it this way you'll be more inclined to answer than just pass it off (so there!). So I nominate the following to spill their guts in their blog - tell all!!

Lovely Daughter (there's method to my madness here)

Kitchen Logic

Art

Moody Gemini

Poolie (this ought to be good)

Miss Hiss

Have at it, Bloggers - I have to go to the store now and lay in supplies for the Cookie Bakers!!