Author Archive: Christopher Waldrop

JJ’s (now closed) Coffee Shop.

When I heard that more than a hundred Christmas trees were stolen from a Boy Scout troop in Tennessee my second thought was, what’s the value of a stolen Christmas tree? My first thought, obviously, was, what kind of jerk steals a bunch of Christmas trees? And this wasn’t a spontaneous one-person job either. You don’t just wander through a Christmas tree lot in an oversized coat and discreetly slip a ten-foot blue spruce into your pocket. Although if you can do that you should perform that trick for Penn & Teller, but that’s another story. This was clearly some southern Charlie Croker and his gang. As for the value I asked a friend who’d worked on Christmas tree lots and he just said, “You’d be surprised.” Good Christmas trees can go for a lot of money, which may be why I see so many Scout troops selling them around this time of year, and why there have been multiple tree thefts around the country. I’m sorry the troops are taking a pretty big financial hit and also that the Scouts generally now have to worry about extra security.

As a former Boy Scout, and Eagle Scout, myself I also feel like I missed out on something since my troop never sold Christmas trees. We made a lot of money from car washes—we were lucky that our regular meeting place was a church that was right on the corner of a very busy intersection. A few times a bona fide eighteen-wheeler drove in and offered us fifty bucks for a “wash”, which was really an act of charity since most of us weren’t much taller than the tires. We also made a fair amount from rummage sales and raffles. Selling Christmas trees would have been a lot of fun. I’d guess some of the Scouts get to spend the night among the trees which, for me, would have been a lot of fun because I’d never have thought anyone would actually steal any trees. So much for that.

One of the sad aspects of this story is that live Christmas trees take a long time to grow and then are only used for such a short time. At least that was my first thought. Then I remembered that sometimes as soon as the 27^th or 28^th of December I’ve seen trees piled up at a local park. They’re turned into mulch which gets donated to local parks, including Radnor Lake. I’ve been a regular hiker and volunteer at Radnor. One of my jobs has even been spreading mulch on trails. I’ve probably walked on, and spread the remains of, former Christmas trees. I know it doesn’t help the troop but at least there is a bright side that, stolen or not, all those old trees will still benefit people in the coming year.

There’s a whole spectrum—pun very much intended—of holiday lights decorating houses. As a kid I loved brightly decorated houses and begged my parents to get lights for our house. My father finally did and we put strings of red, white, green, and blue bulbs around the holly trees at either end of the house. And that’s when I realized outdoor Christmas lights aren’t that exciting because I spent most of the time inside the house and couldn’t see them. We also lived on a cul-de-sac so the only people who ever saw them were our neighbors and the exceptionally rare person who took a wrong turn after dark.

Some houses, mainly the more expensive ones, use strings of solid white lights, which I think is really dull. Whatever holiday you’re celebrating should be celebrated with festive colors. Plain white lights are for any time of the year and belong inside the house. They’re for your kitchen, your bathroom, and the attic or basement where you store your holiday decorations for at least ten months of the year. (Don’t get me started on people who start putting up Christmas kitsch in September.)

A few houses are decked out with solid blue lights, though, and I like the simple, cool austerity. Here we rarely get snow, even at Christmas, and there’s something about the solid blue that, to me, evokes polar landscapes. Maybe it also brings back some childhood memories. My mother baked a wide range of holiday cookies but one of my favorites were simple star-shaped sugar cookies blue with food color, each one with a sugary silver ball—they’re called dragées—in the center. My grandparents also had a solid white Christmas tree they put in their living room. They strung it with multi-colored lights and plastic icicles, but it was the blue lights that stood out most to me.

As beautiful as I think they can be, though, I wish the tree in the front window had some color. The holidays should be festive—white lights on your tree are for any time of year.

Source: Wikipedia

I saw a kit for a gingerbread house in the store. It reminded me that I still don’t understand the point of gingerbread houses. When I was a kid I’d see them in stores, maybe in displays at the mall, and sometimes at school. Sometimes classmates made them and brought them in to show off. All that left me wondering, hey, when do we get to eat the gingerbread house? If anyone did I wasn’t around to get a piece. And I wanted a piece. I loved, and still love, gingerbread, and also ginger ale, ginger beer, ginger snaps. When it came to Gilligan’s Island I wanted to hang out with the Professor, but that’s another story. A friend of my parents who loved to throw dinner parties made homemade gingerbread, and it’s still the best I ever had. It was thick and soft, more like cake than bread, and she’d lightly drizzle it with a lemon sauce. Such intense flavors shouldn’t work together but they did; the lemon heightened the spiciness of the ginger.

Now that we’ve got a whole series that asks the question Is It Cake? a gingerbread house might seem, at best, retro—and maybe that’s part of the appeal. There’s a nostalgia factor. The history of gingerbread in Europe goes back over a thousand years; in the Middle East and beyond it goes back even further since it was brought to Europe by returning Crusaders. In the 17th century guilds controlled the production of gingerbread for most of the year, but at Christmas and Easter anyone could bake it—anyone who could afford it, anyway. Ginger was a very expensive import then, though by the 19th century it was easier to get. Charles Baudelaire sent gingerbread as a gift to friends, and recommended “English gingerbread, very thick, very black, so close that it has neither holes nor pores…”

And I also found this from The Country of Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett:

[T]he most renowned essay in cookery on the tables was a model of the old Bowden house made of durable gingerbread, with all the windows and doors in the right places, and sprigs of genuine lilac set at the front. It must have been baked in sections, in one of the last of the great brick ovens, and fastened together on the morning of the day. There was a general sigh when this fell into ruin at the feast’s end, and it was shared by a great part of the assembly, not without seriousness, and as if it were a pledge and token of loyalty. I met the maker of the gingerbread house, which had called up lively remembrances of a childish story. She had the gleaming eye of an enthusiast and a look of high ideals.
“I could just as well have made it all of frosted cake,” she said, “but ‘twouldn’t have been the right shade; the old house, as you observe, was never painted, and I concluded that plain gingerbread would represent it best. It wasn’t all I expected it would be,” she said sadly, as many an artist had said before her of his work.

It sounds wonderful but she still doesn’t answer the question, did they eat the gingerbread house?