Somewhere in my youth, I discovered the movie Bell, Book, and Candle with Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak. It was one of my mother’s most liked movies, and she always joked that we should make Gillian Holroyd’s tree.
If you have seen the movie, then you know the tree is made of concentric gold rings held together with gold macrame cord. Not an easy tree to emulate since the weight of it might be a problem.
So started the period of making different style trees for Christmas. My mother, years ago, made the Daily Oklahoman style section with a tree she created out of a large tumbleweed. She painted a good sizes tumbleweed white and then added tiny glass balls and beads.
We decided to spend one cold (very) at South Padre Island, Texas, mistakenly believing it would be warm. It wasn’t. We stayed at an older property called the Sand Dollar inn. It was next to the hotel we always stayed at for Spring Break. The Sand Dollar was a series of casitas with large windows in the front. Since we had no tree, my mother, father and I constructed one from driftwood, fishing net, and shells we either bought or collected. We made it triangular, and wrapped lights around it. In the dark, in front of the giant window, it looked like a real tree, until you really looked at it. Then it appeared as it the lights were floating in air.
The next tree, was modeled after a spiral one I’d seen at a local store called Flower City. My dad and I took a broom handle and placed a knob at one end. Then we painted it dark green. I took two grapevine wreaths and wrapped one of those realistic looking pine garlands all the way around the grapevine that had been cut apart so that the wreath spiralled.
Dad engineered the tree base by finding a motorized bottom that we hid in a flower pot. The motor turned the center pole. We hung the grapevine so that it spiraled around the center pole. We used some of our traditional ornaments such as the tree faerie, but most of the ornaments for this tree were special made by my dad and I.
He cut from a large piece of wood a bunch of stars and moons…half moons. We painted all of them bright metallic gold with a lacquer paint and clear gloss varnish. Dad placed a loop screw in the top of all of them, and I used flora wire to wire them to the grapevine. The tree had some of the first clear battery operated lights. It rotated beautifully and was a gorgeous 6ft Solstice tree. We had a lovely woodcut star on top of it too.
Merry Winter Solstice!
siriusmoonlight 