Our tree was always real.  My sister, my mother and I would go to a tree lot to pick it about a week before Christmas.  This was Detroit and in my memory it is cold and there is snow on the ground.  We picked short needled trees of medium height and (of course) well shaped.  We used a mix of glass balls my mother had collected over the years.  When we were old enough, I can’t remember when that was, we helped decorate the tree – after my mother put on the beads, the tinsel and the multicolored lights.  We had the big lights but they were pointy.  My grandparents had round lights.  The icicles went on last and there was no tossing.  It was put on a few pieces at a time up and down all the branches.  I remember one year that my mother did not want to trim the tree and was pretty unpleasant about my sister and me doing it and doing it NOW, but usually it was a pleasant evening, either Christmas eve or close to it.  My mother usually had on the CBC, the Canadian station and by that time they would be playing Christmas music. The tree was always beautiful.

My maternal grandparents, Nanny and Poppy, waited until Christmas eve to buy the tree and set it up.  The tree was always scrawny and thin but that was how their tree was supposed to be.  Their ornaments were very old.  I wonder what happened to them.  What I remember are some little Santas that went on the tree and a jolly Father Christmas looking Santa that stood in the window with his removable pipe. 

My paternal grandparents had a bigger house and a big, full, long needled tree that was in the corner of the living room next to the stairs.  My uncles Louis and Hugh plus my aunt Barbara and cousin Ernie lived there in addition to my grandparents so there were always a lot of presents under the tree.

The black and white photographs are all from the same Christmas.  I think it was 1962.  I was still in high school, about 15.  My sister was two years younger.  Unfortunately these were all taken with a polaroid and they show it.  The colored photo is from 1968. We had moved into the flat we shared with my grandparents.  They were downstairs and we were upstairs.   I had just graduated from Wayne State University and was about to head out into the world to seek my fortune. But that’s another story.