MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Disclaimer:  everything contained in this blog is MY OPINION.  Every attempt is made to present the truth through actual facts or to identify statements which are in doubt;  otherwise there will be no deliberate presentation of gossip, rumor, or innuendo which can't be proven as factual.

Due to considerable demands on my time, this blog is discontinued.  It may resume at a later date, but at the moment there are no plans to do that in the foreseeable future.

Christmases are different all over the world.  We spent a lot of them in non-Christian countries.
Malta, being Catholic, celebrated all the religious holidays with great fanfare.  Christmas there was almost the best I've seen anywhere, although early Electra, London, and Elko, Nevada are definitely in the running. However,  Malta celebrated on every level:  realistic marzipan fruit and flower decorations at the bakery, wax figures of the Christ child displayed in the front windows of homes, shops, no matter how small, with tinsel and lights, songs and enormous religious displays, yule logs, bright cellophane Christmas trees, cotton snow everywhere, a composite representation of all the nationalities that had been in Malta from time to time. It went on for the entire month of December, and it was beautiful.
In non-Christian countries, the people knew that foreigners celebrated that day, and although they didn't understand it, they respected it.  They knew that it equaled gifts, both given and received, and in most cases, given on our part, especially in the Arab countries.
However, when we were in Libya, Haj Mohammed, the man with whom I traded, knew something was up with Christmas.  It puzzled him a bit, because there was no Moslem celebration of Yesu (our Jesus), a minor prophet, but he was willing to go along with whatever we wanted to do.
We had somehow lost our poisonous green cellophane tree that we'd had in Malta, and there were none available in Tripoli.  My husband asked Haj if he could get us a tree.  My husband spoke fluent formal Peninsular Arabic, but that's a good deal different from Saharan Arabic.  I spoke a bit of Maltese, which is somewhat kin to North African Arabic, and between the two of us, we thought Haj knew what we wanted.
He assured us that he could acquire the proper tree.
Several days later, I heard whooping and hollering and stepped out on the front porch to see what was going on.  Across the sand, completely ignoring the road, came a big black car with men and boys hanging out the windows banging on the doors and yelling. Haj was perched like a hood ornament on the front end, and a blocks-long rooster tail of dust was boiling up from the back.
It was Haj and his sons.  With a tree.  A really, really big tree.
It was a cypress, cut from one of the Italian farms' windbreaks, and it was probably 40 feet long.  The butt end of it was stuffed into the trunk, lashed so completely with ropes that it was impossible to tell what it was.  It looked like a gigantic ball of twine. Apart from the butt end of it, which was probably 6 feet in diameter including branches, the rest protruded maybe three car lengths behind.
The car came to a screeching halt in front of our gate and Haj leaped out with a lethal-looking curved dagger that was big enough to have cut the tree down-and probably had.  He proceeded to hack and slash at the ropes until the tree was loose.  His sons dragged it from the trunk onto the sand, where it landed with an ear (and branch) shattering thump, which brought everyone in the neighborhood to their front doors.
My husband, who had stood utterly bemused and silent, watching the whole operation, reached into his pocket like an automaton and gave Haj money.  Haj and his sons pounded each other on the shoulders, shouted "Mabruk!" (Felicitations) to us, and roared off back across the desert to celebrate.
We stared at the tree.  Suddenly it occurred to us that cutting a tree out of a windbreak was illegal. VERY illegal.  We yanked the tree through the gate and laid it sideways, where it crushed my carnations and stretched across the flowerbeds along the entire front of the house.  Finally my husband grabbed a saw and cut off about six feet from the bottom. He rolled it out the front gate, where it stood, like a huge ragged green doily against the wall.
Having done that, he maneuvered the base up the porch steps and told me to drag the tree into the house!
Struggling, sweating, and  saying words  which simply aren't Christmas-y in every language I knew, I got the tree into the hall.  It went from the front door past the living and dining rooms, the kitchen, a bedroom and the tip end came to rest against the back hall wall.
We set about dismembering it and trimming it down to a size that would fit under our 12 foot ceilings. Finally it measured to fit, and we managed to get it upright and nailed to several boards to support it.  We stood back to admire our accomplishment....
The tree was entirely denuded of branches right down to the trunk on one side.  The abrasive drag across 20 miles of desert had sanded it smooth.
Startled,  we turned it so that the bare side was toward the wall and the branched side faced the living room.  We decorated it lavishly, and I went to cook.  That evening, when guests were due for dinner, I opened the wooden floor-to-ceiling ghibli screen on the wide front windows and turned the lights on.
Our guests were laughing hilariously when they came in the front door.  I went outside to discover that while I was in the kitchen, my husband had painted the bare side red and white like a barber pole. I'm sure he intended it to be a candy cane or the North Pole, but it simply looked like a scraggley tree painted red and white.
It was a sight.
Apparently never to be forgotten, for as we travelled and met friends in other places at Christmas time, they never failed to remind us.  Face it:  we could never hope to top that Libyan Christmas tree.

Also never to be forgotten was the late news of the loss of Scottish, French,  and Italian cousins in WW II, and  the first Christmas my Uncle Ed was home.  He had been captured on Bataan and in a Japanese prison camp until the end of the war.  He weighed less than 100 pounds when he came home, but we were so glad to have him with us that after the initial shock, we ignored how he looked and concentrated on feeding him.  That was, perhaps, not a merry Christmas, but an intensely grateful one.

Anita Huguelet McMurtrie.