When my mother was a child, one of her family’s favorite traditions was to always get a real Christmas tree. As my Grandma recalls, they would even cut down their own at a local farm. In this particular year, my Grandma and Papa had gotten the tree much earlier than normal. To preserve it, my Grandma had the idea of putting it through a chair they had with wide metal slats and into a bucket of water.
At the time this idea had seemed just fine being that it was a warm year. But as time went on, the tree and its makeshift setup had not been watched over and as the mild November turned December the temperatures dropped quickly.
This realization came one chilly day when Grandma thought it would be a good idea to see how the tree was doing. While Papa was at work, Grandma walked out to the tree and saw that the tree had been frozen in the water.
Grandma knew Papa wouldn’t be happy so she immediately grabbed all her kettles and started boiling water. She tried to dump the boiled water onto the frozen water but it was not going as planned.
Grandma’s neighbor Mrs. Moterson could see the steam rising high above the fence that separated the two houses. When she approached the fence, she peeked through the tiny slats to find complete chaos. Grandma was running around back and forth time and time again and finally loosened it up.
As the story goes, Mrs. Moterson yelled through the slats, “Lois, What are you doing?!” To which the two could only laugh about for years and family holidays to come.
The question I was left with was whether or not Papa ever found out about this situation. Grandma had nothing to say except “Oh yeah!!”