The Big Sandy Mountaineer -

When I was a little boy in the winter often my friends and I went to movies. Mostly it was the Lyric where you would get a cartoon, serial, and double feature for 14 cents. But then there was the walk home. I veered a block out of my way not to pass the Funeral Home. (After seeing "The House of Wax" it was a four blocks out of my way not to go anywhere near where dead people were.)

With my friends it was a chatty walk probably to a sleep over. When alone and during the Christmas season I loved to look in windows (from afar, mind you) and see halls decked with holly, mistletoe, garland and trees with lights reaching to the ceiling. I especially liked going past the Almas house on 4th Avenue and seeing a tree in their den which had two enormous white tail deer on each side of the fireplace. (Those deer are now on the third floor balcony of Lake McDonald Lodge. Life is funny that way.)

One Christmas I trudged through the snow up Second Avenue. When I got to the English style house at 503 their windows were all lighted and I could see a tree that literally took up half the room! It was magnificent. That was the home of Francis and Laened Black, owners of Black's Jewelry in Havre. I invented a reason to come over to their house (I knew them from Clear Creek where they lived in the nicest log cabin I had even seen. A walking bridge going to the cabin, shutters that really worked on the windows and even Dutch doors.) Anyway I went over and saw simply the largest tree I had ever seen. It seemed to stretch half way across their large living room. Each branch must have had a string of lights just for that branch. Laened had delicate glass balls as large as basketballs on the tree and there must have been ten thousand strands of tinsel, each one patiently put on. Years later I asked them how they ever did that and worked as well. They said they stayed up half the night for a week and were exhausted before the Christmas season even got into full swing. Anyway those trees still rank as the most beautiful I had ever seen!

I once asked Francis and Laened if they had ever spent Christmas at Clear Creek. They said once. They got a huge Christmas tree. It was so large they couldn't get it in the door but fortunately they had a window it would fit through. Once up, they decided to flock the tree. In those days you flocked your tree by making a mixture made mostly by Lux soap. They had long ladders and were flocking high on the tree. One of the ladders got so slippery from the flocking that Liz Wilkie slipped from the top rung and slid fifteen feet to the floor. Well, they got the tree decorated, went to town when a blizzard struck and they could not get back to the cabin until Easter. That was the last Christmas spent at the cabin for a number of years.

In my neighborhood we were a full service Christmas tree service. As trees landed outside by garbage pails after Christmas we kids would haul them up to the College hill and turn them into five and six room tree forts. We would haul thousands of buckets of water to the tree forts from our homes to pour over the trees causing them to become sort of tree like igloos. Even the roofs were trees and they were magnificent forts I must say.

Each time our parents went to Devlin School PTA they would come home with another couple of comic books that had been banned so we had to ditch them from our comic book collection. When even Felix the Cat was banned things had gone too far. Who was that Devlin PTA to tell us what we could read? So we all would take our collection of banned comic books to the tree forts. Armed with parkas, flashlights and piles of comics, what a wonderful way to spend a Saturday afternoon!

At the Lou Lucke Company we decorated the store at Christmas with hundreds of live Christmas trees bought from the Snow Line Tree Company in Kalispell. We always got twenty foot trees to give to churches and supplied the family trees as well. Grandma Lucke always said she got the very worst trees ever. Hers were pretty bad but my mother said she always got the worst of the store trees. I helped decorate Grandma Lucke's trees each year for many years using ornaments and lights that appeared to come over on the ark. Her tree was normally ten feet high and two feet wide. Strange trees, indeed. She always put her tree on the north end of her large living room. One year I asked why we didn't put the tree right by her fireplace on the other end of the room. With great reluctance on her part we did. One evening it fell down and almost burned the house down, its top landing in the fire. Never again by the fire.

My mother's story of one Christmas and trees is a family classic. Daddy had brought home the usual horrid tree. She thought she just could not stand it that year, and went down to Safeway and bought a beautiful tree. She hauled the Store tree two blocks away and stashed it by some garbage cans. Then she put up the Safeway tree only to find that it had been the tree that a hundred cats chose to pee on. So that came down. She drug it to where the store was still laying in an alley, drug the store tree back home, decorated it and when Daddy came home that night he was heard to exclaim, "That is the best tree yet!" He wondered why the silence for two days.

For most people cutting their own tree is akin to dragging a dead dear a mile or so. Dangerous. We had a family outing to get a tree one Christmas. Went to the top of Sucker Creek and found a wonderful tree on the top of a mountain. By the time Daddy cut it down and got it to the car and strapped to the top, I thought he was going to have a heart attack.

When I lived in the Bear Paws friends usually helped me get a live tree. Believe me when I tell you that in twenty years I only got one really great Bear Paw tree. We learned early that the best trees are the top of a fifty foot Douglas fir. Only problem is when you climb up the tree at 20 below, saw it through and it drops, it drops so hard and is so cold that there is not a needle left on the tree! Happened more than once.

The strangest experience I ever had concerning Bear Paw Christmas trees came right out of Macbeth. A friend and I were driving through a snow storm on the reservation south of Beaver Creek Park. I would like to say we were going to cut a tree south of the reservation but that would probably not be true. Anyway, as we drove, I looked out the window of the pickup and saw two trees marching of their own volition right across the mountainside. I hollered at my friend to stop and we both watched those trees heading north and a little down the mountainside. It was two people who had gotten trees illegally from the reservation. They thought that no one would notice a moving tree on the mountainside but someone might notice two slightly tipsy guys hauling trees.

All those many years later when I moved to the Flathead Valley, there was once again the Snow Line Tree Company. And they flocked trees. Remembering the Black's flocked tree and seeing the real flocking of trees with snow on the high mountains, as long as I lived at Somers, I had flocked trees.

Alas, when I moved back home there were no flocked trees to be had in Havre anymore. I confess I bought a fake one flocked for an enormous amount of money. It looks very real and five years later it is sitting in my dining room as this is being written.

And do you know that this time of year I always leave my drapes open when the Christmas lights are on. Who knows when some youngster might look in and someday write a story just like this one.

Merry Christmas!