My Christmas Tree

Since my early schoolboy days, I have been a Christmas tree aficionado. In those callow days, Christmas was a time when I built a “holly stand” out by the old Wrightsville Road in Seagate, our little town on Bradley Creek.

Propped against my holly stand were one or two unadorned Christmas trees that I had gleaned from the thick forests that surrounded our town.

At my holly stand, the Christmas tree was my main stock in trade, but I also offered my customers bunches of red-berried holly, white-berried mistletoe, and glossy, green vines of smilax, something that we called bamboo, which were used to decorate the doorways of our homes.

My daddy didn’t much care for my cedar trees, and as Christmas approached he invariably brought home a spruce that he purchased at the Kiwanis Christmas tree lot in Wilmington. Daddy’s spruce was always our Christmas tree. But in my estimate, my cedars were just as pretty as the spruces that were raised in front of the picture window inside our little house.

When the Kiwanis spruce was raised, it was always my job to decorate that “foreign” tree and make it into an acceptable, rustic Seagate Christmas tree.

As I grew older, I realized there was a lot of symbolism in those trees that were such a part of my childhood. They were symbols of newborn life. 

They were the trees of life, and celebrated the birth of God’s child. Our Christmas trees, like the steeples atop the churches in our town, and like the minarets in Arabia, the spires in England, the stuppas in China, and the onion domes in Russia, all pointed upward to our God in heaven.

Somewhere in my midlife I became very interested in that symbolism. Throughout the world, there were religious structures formed like our Christmas trees and they all pointed upwards to heaven asking for the same gift of life.

I learned, too, that the square and its three-dimensional counterpart, the cube, was a symbol of the male principle, a symbol of the father who always made sure that a Christmas tree stood in our picture window. I discovered that the circle and its three-dimensional counterpart, the sphere, was a symbol of the feminine principle, the mother who made sure my decorations were set in the right places. I learned, too, that the triangle and the pyramid, shaped like a Christmas tree, were symbols of the child.

Then one day, the symbols of the father, mother and child came together in my mind as one all-inclusive symbol for family unity.

In the summer of 2023, I put together a proposed piece of glass sculpture that placed the symbols of man, woman and child together in close communion. The sphere would be placed inside the cube, and the Christmas tree pyramid inside the sphere. Together in a single, simple piece of sculpture, the family of man would be brought together in one artwork that symbolized family unity.

Further in the study of my three-part sculpture, I discovered that artist and author Peter Probyn put together a similar three-part artwork in drawings that appeared in his The Complete Drawing Book.

Probyn was not intending to give a lesson in family unity. His drawings were only intended to demonstrate an artistic technique — how objects drawn in simple outline could be given depth, greater definition, more naturalism and realism by casting the illusion of light on them with pencil shading and shadowing. The symbols of man, woman and child were there — but in the form of a box, a beach ball, and a tree.

Although put together to demonstrate a technique in art, there seemed to be a profound religious statement in Probyn’s drawings — that light, as radiant energy from the sun, can build a more natural, more stable, more intimate family unit. We remember that Christ, the Child of God, told us in John 8:12 that “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

In the first group of Probyn’s series of sketches we see the square, the circle and the triangle are all one-dimensional and standing apart from each other. In the illustration of light scene in the final group of drawings, we see these forms in close communion. They have become three-dimensional objects with the application of light. Father, mother and child are now ancient symbols, the cube, the sphere and the pyramid in the form of a box, a beach ball in a tree, perhaps the tree of life.

I realized in a flash of insight that Probyn’s box, beach ball and tree are objects that are brought together in our homes at Christmas time.

The tree is a symbol of the child and the most important part of our Christmas celebration. Beneath the tree, we stack boxes of presents. These boxes are cubes, ancient symbols of man and father. The boxes contain the gifts that man has given the world over the ages, gifts that were given to him by God. In a more intimate relationship with the tree and the child are the glass spheres the decorate the tree. These sculptures,ancient symbols of womankind and motherhood, are comparable to Probyn’s beach balls.

With these thoughts in mind, I composed a simple drawing of a Christmas tree with boxes of presents gathered at its base, and beautiful red spherical ornaments placed in the branches. Here was man, woman and child gathered together in symbolic form in the American home at Christmas time.

As these forms are gathered, it is my hope that we all can learn the lesson of family unity that our Christmas trees seem to teach us. I wish a merry Christmas to every family in America and beyond.