"Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree"

This wooden angel was carved for the Christmas tree, but what follows are ornaments carved from the Christmas trees of Christmases past.

For over half a century now I have enjoyed the wonderful experience of the Christmas tree. Each mid-winter season we adopt an anonymous evergreen as part of the family, if only for a few brief days, and it takes on a magical nature of its own in the process.

It begins with the gathering - whether it was the drive to a neighboring farm with my father in the 1950s to select one cut on the local woodlot, for the grand cost of a dollar or two, or more recently paying twenty times that to cut one off a tree farm a few miles away. Once the thing has entered the house and is upright in its base, the magic begins. The lights are strung and all the heirloom ornaments are brought out - wonderful objects seen but once a year, and not for all these twelve months past.

Then the first evening comes, the lights are turned on, and what was a few days ago just another little tree in the woods is now the very essence of Christmas. Unnumbered are the nights I have spent staring into that fathomless depth of branches, sparkling colored lights and deep, mysterious shadow to imagine the images of Christmas Past. In the end the tree becomes part of the house and of another unique Christmas the family will always remember as special for whatever year it is.

And so it has often seemed so tragic, if not brutal, to in the end strip the tree of its ornamentation and banish it from the house. While we carefully wrap and box each of the ornaments to preserve them for the next year, we just drag the naked tree unceremoniously off to the curbside, or into the woods to lay unwanted and forgotten.

Finally, in 1979, coincidental with the birth of our daughter, Meghan, I discovered a remedy for the inevitable transience of these wonderful trees. That year, as the tree was taken outside to be tossed into the woods, I took my saw and cut off about six inches of the bottom of the trunk. This piece I carefully set aside on a cellar shelf, where it quietly dried the year long. Then in the days before the next Christmas, I took that stump and split and cut and sanded the wood it offered until an ornament had been created for the new tree about to arrive.

A moon I carved for the tree a while back, using some stock lumber I had left over in my shop.

Of course I had been known to carve up an ornament or two before from scraps of boards I had saved from some project or another. The angel and moon above are some of these. But they were not of the same association as these bits made from the trees of Christmases past.

These ornaments trended a bit toward the country or folk style, being chopped out of a chunk of pine that would not normally be considered suitable for anything but the woodstove. But that is perhaps part of the charm; that something as mundane as a tree stump could in the end be transformed into something of some marginal beauty.

And when each is finished, I carve or paint on the bottom the date. It would be understood that the date was the year it was made, the wood being taken from the tree of the Christmas previous.

And so the tradition was begun, and I have kept faithfully to it ever since. My daughter is twenty now, and we have a collection of nineteen ornaments and one stump. Someday this collection will be hers, and I guess the very last of the collection will just remain as a stump; me not being able to finish it myself.

So I thought I would create this webage as an exhibit of the collection, and a place to record a few notes on each, which may yet be of some interest to anyone who comes across this collection.

	1980	This was the first ornament made from the trunk of the first tree on the year Meghan was born.
	1981	This year I turned a set of toy soldiers like this on my new lathe as a Christmas present for Meghan.
	1982	Just a country house, perhaps a little like ours in Hoags Corners.
	1983	This angel's trumpet was like the one I made for the carving at the top of the page.
	1984	A copy of a folk angel - we were reading a lot of County Living magazine.
	1985	This year I had been making some country checkerboards with an eye to selling them.
	1986	Just a country Santa, perhaps inspired by some folk Santas we had seen.
	1987	A toy block like the ones I used to play with.
	1988	This year I had gotten into building ships in bottles.
	1989	We spent a lot of time at the Shaker Village, thus the Shaker design of Heart and Hand.
	1990	This stump split very badly, but in the end the rough chunk became a country Santa.
	1991	We had been cutting our own trees from a sheep farm nearby, which we loved.
	1992	I think I ran out of ideas this year.
	1993	This year we had gone to England and Ireland - a wonderful experience - and also moved to our new house.
	1994	A snowman that must have been inside the stump and just needed finding.
	1995	This one was inspired by the horses that pastured behind our house in the summer.
	1996	We went back over the ocean, this time to spend three great weeks in Northern Ireland!
	1997	About time we captured our winter feeding of the birds.
	1998	The past year I had gotten into collecting Roman coins from my cousin Thom's website.
	1999	Although Melodie and I returned to England, the big event was Meghan moving out on her own to a house like this one.
	2000	We'll have to wait to see what the year suggests from this stump.