When I was looking up information on the internet about the history of Christmas trees, I came across an interesting trivia fact.
The website, https://www.history.com/topics/christmas/history-of-christmas-trees, revealed that "the tallest living Christmas tree is believed to be the 122-foot, 91-year-old Douglas fir in the town of Woodinville, Washington." That caught my eye, because my niece and her family recently moved to Woodinville, a town I had never heard of until they moved there.
It made me think that an entertaining family activity might be to learn interesting facts about Christmas traditions in your family. For example, what kind of Christmas tree did your family use when you were a child? What kind of tree did your grandparents use?
When my son was in elementary school, he came home with a question. His teacher wanted all the kids to find out what kind of Christmas tree their parents had as a child.
I wasn't sure. We had grown up overseas, in the Sudan, where my parents spent several years working. When I asked her, my elderly mother said it was a sesaban tree. The closest spelling I can find to that on the internet is a sesban tree. My mother died a few years ago, so I can't ask her anything more about the tree, what it looked like, where it typically grew, or why they chose to use that kind of tree.
Information like that gets lost so easily unless someone in the family interviews parents, grandparents and other relatives and writes down what they say. When I was a child, I didn't wonder what kind of decorated Christmas tree stood in our living room. My mind was captured by all the Christmas gifts in colorful wrapping under the tree.
When I attended college in Kansas, I found a tumbleweed and brought it to my dorm room to decorate for Christmas. It was just the right size, and the decorated tumbleweed captured the Christmas spirit. Once out of college, I abandoned the tumbleweed idea. Today, I use the same artificial tree my husband and I bought more than 40 years ago. It still works great, and it holds many good memories.
If you decide to ask some of your relatives about their Christmas memories, you might discover some interesting, intriguing facts.