When I went to Vietnam in November of 1967, Linda and I had been married for five months. Linda decided that she would like to stay with my family while I was away, little did she know of the life style changes she would uncover. For instance, instead of having just two sisters she gained three brothers and one sister who were all strangers to her.
One of the first life changes she had was Christmas of 1967. Mom broke out the Christmas decorations and Linda was surprised to come home to find a Christmas tree with leaves made of a shiny aluminum, it had a rotating color light wheel that sat on the floor aimed up at the tree. The light wheel would rotate changing the color of the tree from red to green to yellow, the only decorations were shiny crystal red balls hanging from the limbs. This was not a Christmas Linda was used too, she grew up with a live green tree decorated with bright colored ornaments, strings of garland, strands of blinking lights and doused with silver tinsels that resembled ice cycles and topped off with a star on top. Mom's tree was nothing like Linda's idea of Christmas.
Linda could not believe her eyes when she saw mom's tree, all of a sudden she realized she was far from home. I don't know the exact details but Linda went out and bought the best artificial tree she could find, it looked like a real spruce tree, it was green and stood about seven feet tall. Christmas in the Riggan household in 1967 was different but it was a Christmas more like the ones she grew up with and actually so did I and my siblings, I don't know what my mother was thinking when she bought that tinsel tree.
I came home in the spring and we went to San Diego for a few months before I went back to Vietnam. 1968 was the second Christmas I spent in a foreign land, Linda had gone back to Florida until I came home again in the spring of 1969.
For many years afterwards we celebrated Christmas with the tree Linda had bought in 1967. We lived in rentals for the first three years and put up our tree but every Christmas Eve we celebrated ,with my family. Mom went back to her chrome tree with the rotating light but we always came home to a green tree covered in bright decorations.
In the early 1970's we bought our first house in an older section of East Nashville, it 35 years old then and miraculously it still stands today. I expanded the house by opening up the old garage and breezeway. I replaced the garage door with a large picture window that was made up with 72 individual panes of glass and come Christmas we put up Linda's tree and decorated it. We had the usual colored crystal balls, garland and tinsel but I wanted it to stand out so I added more lights. Actually, I added a lot of lights, I had 400 hundred lights on the tree, it was really bright both inside the house and outside, we were the talk of the neighborhood, I wouldn't be surprised if it could be seen from space.
Linda's tree became a part of the family traditions. In 1978 we left Tennessee, the next twenty years found us moving all across the country from Tennessee to Florida to California to Georgia to Kansas to Georgia to California and back to Georgia. Linda's tree brightened all of our Christmases until the early 2000's, by then it was showing it's age. The boys were young men now and leaving home, Christmas just wasn't the same anymore, I don't remember when we retired her tree, sometime about 2005 I think. It was replaced with a smaller ceramic tree Linda had made back in the 1970's, it stood about 20 inches tall, it was not as bright, it was a sign of us slowing down.
I have become accustomed to the meager Christmas, Linda and I would celebrate with the boy's but without all the fanfare of decorations, we had arrived at the point where we understood that Christmas was for young children and ours were no longer young. Danny followed in our footsteps and didn't settled in to having kids until in his thirties and as it turned out Linda only got to spend two Christmases with her granddaughter.
Kay and I have a rather spartan Christmas, we don't put up a tree, decorating for Christmas consist of a centerpiece on the table, cards and stockings on the mantle and a wreath on the door. We have a family gathering at Vicki's house and I go to watch the kids open their presents on Christmas morning then Kay and I go to a family gathering with her family. The grandkids are getting older and in a few years probably won't want to hang around with old people but then maybe they will.
Every now and then something will jog my memory of long ago Christmases which is what caused me write this story. I'm grateful we have memories, they are the history books of our life and every day we write another page.
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