Hunting for Christmas trees……..

This was always my favorite time of the year for me as a child. I would be almost giddy with excitement. I loved the holiday from school and getting great toys on Christmas day.

During the school break, I would always go spend a week with my grandmother in Waverly Alabama. Waverly was like stepping back in time and was not affected much by the modern world. My grandmother still used well water when I was a child and she also kept chickens for the eggs and the fried chicken for Sunday lunch. My great aunt could take a chicken, clean it, and fry it in under an hour and this always amazed me. I learned real quickly to not give the chickens pet names but I spent many an hour chasing them and hunting for “yard eggs”.

A cherished ritual that I always enjoyed was the annual hunt for a Christmas tree the week before Christmas day. We would crank up the old 1968 ford truck, grab a band saw, and head for the woods to a favorite location. The old ford truck had “three on a tree” for those of you old enough to remember when vehicles still had shifters like this.

I would always drive even though I was only around ten years old at the time. My grandmother and her two sisters would even get me to drive them all the way to Camp hill Alabama to get their hair done but that is another story for another time.

An artificial Christmas tree was a malicious affront to the holiday to my Grandmother and she would never contemplate the idea of buying one from one of those Christmas tree farms. We would head out into the country and find the perfect Cedar tree and cut it down and bring it home and put it in the front living room. As me and my grandmother looked for hours for that perfect tree, her two sisters would be gathering broom sedge to make homemade brooms. This ritual lasted for many years when I was a child and all the way up until I was in college.

I miss those days and would give everything I owed to have them back. I still, to this day, want to someday retire in Waverly and pass those good times down to my kids and grandkids and carry on the tradition. Who knows, if dreams do come true, then I just may be able to someday.