What to make of our just-installed Christmas tree, and of memories carefully wrapped and stored away in cardboard boxes and plastic crates in a basement until dutifully hung on our tree.

There is a paper Santa Claus, arms spread wide, the word “Daddy” written on him more than 50 years ago.

“Daddy.” A word, a thought, a description that covers a lot of years, a lot of territory. Maybe some tears. Absolutely some tears.

Christmas Tree Holds: Family, Memory and Time

Janet and Bob Hill—the love of Christmas trees past and present

It all comes with the image of my father in our musty, coal-soaked basement nailing a wooden stand on a newly felled red cedar.

We were five kids and two parents and our Collie, ” Lassie.” Once the tree got upstairs, we always decorated it on Christmas Eve, a quaint custom barely preceding the arrival of Santa Claus by a few hours. It worked. We never did see him.

Our modern tree is a clever invention; three parts metal shafts with wire limbs and green plastic leaves and bulbs attached. It offers nine separate light displays and adjustable metal stand.

My Daddy wouldn’t have believed it

Nor would Charlie Brown.

Our tree ornaments are a memory machine; the best are fragile glass bulbs from our first married Christmas together in Houston more than 60 years ago.

Attached to that is the memory of having purchased our first tree with my 6-foot 9-inch basketball buddy, a 14-foot tree taken home to our $75-a-month furnished apartment with a 12-foot ceiling. We just set it up sideways.

Our 2025 tree—not even seven feet tall—offers ornamental memories of trips to Ireland, the Netherlands and New Zealand. Add ornaments hand-stitched by an aunt, a mother-in-law, Janet Hill and our two children. Then the paw print in plaster of a favorite puppy, now gone.

We get to carefully pick the ornaments from the box, place them just so on the tree for the 30th, 40th and even 50th time. Family stuff. What other season allows that?

There is an abundance of Santa Clauses on our tree now, a couple reindeer, a few empty socks and a dangling snowman, each with a story.

Hanging before us is an ornament from our daughter’s first Christmas, a bell- shaped ornament our son made in first grade, many years of commemorative White House ornaments when it had an East Wing.

God knows whose face might be on it this year.

Yet with our Christmas Tree downsizing we still have four plastic crates filled with ornaments sitting before us, all sadly to be hauled back to the dark basement, their stories untold. Having to wait it out another year. Maybe we will get a bigger tree.

I’m tempted to go back down in the basement with the ornaments, open a crate and listen.

Surely my father will join me.