PORTS TAKE LOVE OF CHRISTMAS TO EXALTED HEIGHTS

Bill and Barbara Port spent Monday hovering around their Christmas tree like new parents.

They put an ornament on a branch, took a look, then moved it elsewhere. They worried about types of ornaments and how they looked next to other types.

And in the end, they had a brightly lit, very colorful, 18-foot-tall baby right in their front lobby.

The Ports' famous 3,000-ornament tree stands at 423 Themis this year, just as it has for the past 21 years. It has been a few feet shorter or taller from Christmas to Christmas and new ornaments have replaced some old, but the family tradition of cutting down a huge tree endures.

When the Ports' son and daughter and two grandchildren are in town, the group heads out to River Ridge Tree Farm near Commerce to pick out the tallest, most shapely tree they can find. They rent a trailer to haul it home, and then relatives and neighbors -- even the fraternity brothers from nearby Sigma Nu -- help get the big fir into the house.

A special tree stand balances it, but wires attached to the stairwell help hold it up. Family members use stairs and a ladder to decorate all 18 feet, right up to the smiling angel at the top.

After 39 years of marriage and tradition, Barbara Port said she won't give up her big, fresh tree for an artificial one anytime soon.

"We have people call and say, `My children are here from out of state. Can they come by and see the tree?'" she said. "And of course we always say yes."

It takes a lot of work to create the showpiece. To get it inside, stabilized and decorated this year, the Ports and their children spent about 40 man-hours. They start with the lights, then add unbreakable ornaments about waist-high, then the delicate ones further up.

The pieces come from the Ports' trips all over the world -- Hong Kong, Sweden, Australia, Israel -- and from their friends right here in the United States.

There's no set method for decorating, the couple just put big ornaments in empty spaces and put others here and there until the tree looks right. Then they host lots of holiday get-togethers to show off their hard work.

There have been lessons about tree stabilization and decorating learned over the years.

"We had one fall over in another house," Barbara Port said. "You only decorate the side that shows, so it was heavy on one side. That's when we learned to wire the tree."

"We lost a lot of good ornaments that year," her husband said.

The Christmas tree stays up for several weeks, then is disassembled ornament by ornament. The branches are cut off and the trunk carried out for firewood.

While the Ports only are beginning to enjoy their tree this year, they worry about it being one of their last. The government is looking at their block as a site for a new federal building.

If the block is chosen, they will have to sell their house and move to another -- perhaps one where a 18-foot-tall fir tree won't fit.

"We don't dwell on it -- either it's going to happen or it isn't," Bill Port said. "We've written letters, made phone calls and collected signatures, but we won't moan and groan and wring our hands."

The Port home is 105 years old, and its residents are having it named a historic landmark by the Cape Girardeau Historic Preservation Commission.