By Aimée Cartier
For The Beachcomber

It’s funny how looking back on Christmases past, it’s not the moments you think you would remember that make the most impact. Having a Christmas tree has always been one of my favorite traditions. I loved the lights. As a girl I spent hours curled up on the couch under a blanket enjoying the twinkling of the colored glow. But the tree I remember most was not for the time spent by its side, it was for the short few moments of its astonishing exit.

Our family tradition was to go to a local farm every year, pick our tree straight out of the wild, chop it down and bring it home. My mother remembers that year as the one she finally got the height just perfect, but the width completely wrong.

“It’s hard to judge the size of a tree when it’s surrounded by even bigger trees growing in the wild,” she told me years later. “I was so proud of myself that year for finally figuring out the perhaps now obvious notion that I could choose the tree based on my own height.” For once, we got a tree that she didn’t have to saw the top off of to fit into our home. Unfortunately, though it wouldn’t knick the ceiling, it also wouldn’t fit through the front door.

“Little fatty tree,” as we have now come to call it, was just short of 6 feet tall, but huge around the middle.

“When I stretched my arms out,” my mom said, “they didn’t even go halfway around the tree. It must have been over 10 feet around.”

It wouldn’t fit through the front door, so my mother came up with an alternative plan: Pass the tree through the living room windows.

I was about 6 years old at the time. I didn’t have enough Christmases under my belt to know that for most people, getting their tree into the living room didn’t involve opening windows, taking screens off in the cold December air and shoving the tree through the opening. I guess at the time I thought it was normal.

My mother bought five extra sets of lights just to outfit the circumference. But it wasn’t the illumination that made it so memorable.

First of all, it stayed up forever. I didn’t know then, but that was because my mother was trying to figure out the best way to get it out of our house. Finally, she just wrapped it in old bed sheets and yanked it through the front door and down the hall. I was standing by the door watching when I noticed the trail. In its wake, the tree was leaving a veritable carpet of green needles.

“Mom! Stop! It’s trailing needles over the whole hallway!” I shouted to her.

“I know,” she grunted back in an unhappy but knowing tone.

It got worse the farther she went. What had been just a trickle through our living room was now turning into a flood as she moved forward. Loosened from their forceful exit through the 3-foot-wide door, craving release from their too-long stance in our Christmas tree stand, it seemed like every needle on “little fatty” had come loose. The sheets intended to keep in the needles offered no help. They just held the needles for a moment before pouring them out the back end to the floor. I remember my jaw actually dropped as I watched her pull that thing up the stairs and heard the hard rain of needles falling through the stair slats to the rug below.

I stood there by our apartment door mortified. I envisioned every person who entered into the apartment building saying, “Who made this mess?” and then following it directly to our door. It was like a plush green carpet leading straight to us, probably the only family in the whole place who had kept their Christmas tree up so long past the Yuletide glow.

Today, I have the utmost appreciation for that tree in particular. I find it funny that this is the one I remember most. But what I like best about that tree is how it just keeps on giving. All of these years later, my mother and I can’t stop laughing when we talk about that tree. We reminisce about shoving that tree through the windows with a giggle. By the time we get to the part of the story where I’m standing by the door and she’s lugging the thing through the hallway, both of us are breathless with mirth. When she mentions that the tree actually wore holes in the sheets, I practically cry tears of hilarity.

Sometimes, she’ll conclude with a sigh, “It was a beautiful tree though.” But the truth is, it’s not always the most beautiful moments you remember most, or the most sweet and cozy experiences you’ve made. But in my eyes, if it still makes you laugh 30 years later that was a tree worth having, and definitely one fat success.

— Aimée Cartier is an author, psychic and speaker who lives on Vashon.