Perceptions...

The process of changing perceptions always intrigues me. You see something one way when you are young, or may be not young, but when you first learn it and then later on it makes sense, or links up with other things you know to make a whole thing when you thought you had the whole thing already. It is always more interesting when this awakening spans years or even decades. Makes me wonder what other stuff I hold in my head that is just plain wrong.

Christmas time is a good time for this kind of thing, room for a lot of growth. Staring as a kid and it might last a long time is the excitement of the gifts. It is all about the presents. There may be a change and it's about giving the presents, then the presents are not so important, but then as the journey continues the money gets better and the presents get important again and then we have to back off and examine our faith, or our spirit, the importance of families and friends and so on. Fill in your own thing, you get the idea.

One jolting awakening I had and it really happened last year is when I bought a new Christmas tree stand. If you look at the picture, you can see that we put the Christmas tree in a bay window with a couch in front of it. It's a small tree, always the ugliest on the lot, it finds a home and fits perfect. At least with the old stand it did. When I got a new stand last year it did not fit so well and suddenly thrusting through my memory was the recollection from when I was 8 years old that Uncle Bill nailed the Christmas tree to the floor.

I remember my father, his brothers Leonard, Sammy, all them passed on now and Uncle Don still living in Lufkin discussing Uncle Bill, who passed earlier this year and his decorating skills. (Bill was a little different from some of the other Wallace boys, who could be kind of tight asses, he was a tuba player and do we know about them.) As a youngster I remember listening to the laughter, possibly induced by a couple of Christmas time snorts of Old Crow. They were quite amused by the fact that Bill had nailed the Christmas tree to the floor. Not the way they knew to do it and a little unacceptable to these modern blue collar problem solving plant workers.

In my 8 year old mind I pictured big old nails, may be a little bent like the ones I pulled from old boards that I thought could be reassembled as a club house. My little man mind computed how they were angled through the trunk into the floor to hold it upright and I wondered how many it took and if he had suffered any splitting of the wood like I often did when I nailed stuff that did not really be nailed. His hammer swung in small arcs because there was no room under the tree to swing big. I also thought about my house and how it was on a slab, and I wondered if anything under Bill's floor interfered with the nailing as a concrete slab surely would.

All this flooded back when I tried to put the new tripod stand that replaced a round based stand in the window. The tripod hung a little off the surface of the bay window sill. I noticed there were small holes in each of the feet of this new stand. As I held the tree from falling I hollared at my wife, "Honey, bring three nails and a hammer."