IMAGES OF CHRISTMAS TREE IN THE SMOKEHOUSE

As far as the general excitement of Christmas is concerned, i.e., the extraordinary good cookies, popcorn balls, peanut brittle, the tinsel and baubles, Santa's visit, and presents, especially the presents, it is said that Christmas is for the children. And it is a delight to see the children's eyes light up when they unwrap the just-right doll or hug the longed-for football. However, there are a lot of other things children don't get to enjoy about Christmas as we older ones do, chief of which is remembrances of Christmases past. They just haven't lived long enough.

I think, then, it is up to the older ones to see that the children have a stack of good Christmases to remember when they do get older.

But children are as perverse and selective in their memories as the older ones are. Instead of remembering the Christmas of the first big doll with the real hair and eyes that slept, a little girl might remember that Christmas as the time she picked up a mashed cedar twig in a Christmas tree lot, and for the first time smelled real cedar with all its green pungency

The year that I got my first bought doll, with a china face, which was much later than children do today, I remember the cedar tree in the smokehouse. I sometimes call it, in my mind, Christmas in the Smokehouse.

Our smokehouse was big, may have been a home once. It had a plank floor. From beams hung our cured hams and shoulders. On a wide shelf across one end lay the middlin's. There were bushel baskets full of hulled black walnuts, hickory nuts and popcorn ears a veritable storehouse of things to get us through the winter.

Because of some circumstance of which I can't now recall, Grandpa and Dad had to bring our Christmas tree in early from the woods. They sawed it off smoothly, fastened it securely in the cross pieces and set it up in the middle of the smokehouse to wait until it was a more suitable time to bring it into the house.

I loved that green, untrimmed cedar as much or more than any Christmas tree I've ever had. Each day after arriving home from school, I hurried out to the smokehouse to spend time with "my" tree. It seemed that it was mine alone. No one else paid attention to it until it was taken into the house and trimmed. There were hundreds of such cedar trees in the hills roundabout, but a cedar in the smokehouse! This was special.

The tree's branches were low on the floor and I would part them carefully and settle back into them, breathing deeply of the cedary smell and pretending that I was some forest child and had chosen the protection of this tree for my home. What a friendly home it was for me, wrapping its green aromatic branches

around me, making me feel that my "home" loved me. I was alternately The Little Match Girl, who had found warmth and safety, Cinderella, who had no one to love her and had run away to live in this cedar tree, Heidi, who because of snow on the Swiss Mountains, could not reach the Alms Uncle's hut and had sought shelter.

That I had no furniture in this "home" and nothing to eat didn't seem to bother my imagination. There was the subtle odor of the walnuts and hickory nuts and even the smoky, salty smell of the hams to satisfy me.

Once, Grandma came into the smokehouse to cut a piece off some middlin's for the supper meal and she didn't even see me, sitting there deep within the cedar branches. I immediately became Oliver Twist, hiding from Fagin.

The tree didn't seem to have a thing to do with Christmas, it was only a cedar tree, out of place, that had come to rescue me from some unpleasant situation.

Now, when I see the green trees go up at Christmas, smell their fragrance, and think of how we use these trees to help celebrate the Savior's birth, I can't help but make some hazy, un-thought-out analogy between my smokehouse tree that sheltered me from imagined harm and the green trees that help celebrate the birth of the One who really shelters.

I have to strive to remember that doll I got at the "Smokehouse Christmas," the doll I'm sure Mama thought would make that Christmas memorable.

REJOICE!