RIVER CITY JOURNAL: PUT BRANCH A FROM PACKET 6 BETWEEN UPPER LIMB B

Of course, there is no Limb B, but the instructions are insistent. This is what the world has come to: creating religious symbols from a kit in a box made by non-believing children in a land awaiting a missionary's visit. Alas, Brunot, where is thy cedar sting?

The Norfolk pine in the living room sprouted luxuriant plumage this year in anticipation of a repeat performance as the family Christmas tree. That honor befell the freshly purchased potted tree last year when the family decided to spend the holidays in Florida and couldn't muster the gumption to do a traditional cut evergreen.

Most of the Norfolk pine's good health and stunning good form are due, of course, to the weekly waterings and tender care your wife gives it. The water is heavily laced with plant food. No doubt the young tree is an addict, but what can you do?

Despite its expectation that it would likely be wearing ornaments and a string of lights by now, the pine has been moved across the way to make room for a new nine-foot artificial evergreen that, gauging from the reactions so far of those who have seen it, is a stunning display of holiday imagery and festive sparkles. The tree-from-a-box is one of those fakes that can fool even the trained eye. It looks so real, in fact, that most everyone gives in to the temptation to touch it just to make sure. Ah, technology. What hast thou wrought?

Assembling the tree was one of those curious exercises in making sense of instructions written in the customary Chinese-to-English translation. Would that the manufacturers had spent a moment or two with the King James version. Good old American grit, dolloped with some run-of-the-mill frustration, finally had the tree-to-be in its larval stage. What was left was the hands-on straightening and positioning of each and every branch, shoot and tendril on the tree. There are hundreds of them, and it took a considerable amount of time.

In the course of grasping each needle-infested limb and shaping it into what you suspected nature would do on its own, a thought jumped into your brain. Keep in mind that a family tradition for three decades has been to put Handel's "Messiah" on the stereo whilst decorating the tree, so your thoughts were somewhat elevated by the music. The notion that popped up was this: You could have molded the fake evergreen into almost any shape, but all of your effort was concentrated on making it look like a real tree. When God made the first real nine-foot evergreen, knowing it would one day become a symbol of Christmas to be copied by some child-labor factory in the Orient, he could have given it any form. What fun it must have been deciding to make the needles stand out from the limbs and to make each branch arc slightly upward -- heaven-bound, if you will, straining to see the star that would shine so brightly on one special night.

"Hallelujah!" the choir boomed as the trumpets blared.

All of this is a far cry from the Christmases on the farm in Kelo Valley when you were young. Christmas trees then were common cedars, because they were there. Well, actually there weren't any cedars in Kelo Valley for some strange reason. Greenwood Valley over the hill had a few, but the best and most plentiful cedars came from Brushy Creek where your mother's roots are. Being related to everyone sure makes it easy to find a good tree.

This year's artificial tree has to last a few years, what with amortization and depreciation and so forth. It would have been easier on the pocketbook to find a good cedar somewhere around Brunot. And you've got to think of some way to make up with the Norfolk pine.

All in all, though, there is nothing so magical as getting a good-sized tree decked out in Sunday-go-to-meeting dazzle and stepping back to turn on all those lights. The ones that work, anyway. Also made in China.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.