Cindy Lange-Kubick: Not your typical Christmas tree
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Ann Diers has a 9-foot fake Christmas tree, purchased at a post-holiday sale in 1994.
This year, like always, the tree stands between the kitchen and the family room.
This year, like always, the tree sounds alive.
It whirs. Hums. Vibrates.
It sounds as if, any second now, it will start flapping its branches and fly off this dead-end street in east Lincoln.
This makes Ann’s tree quite unlike most Christmas trees, artificial or otherwise.
The tree sounds alive because on its many branches are many ornaments. Some run on batteries. Some plug into the lights. Others can be wound to make tiny Santas and snowmen pop up, like seasonal Jacks-in-a-box.
Just how many ornaments? Well, 1,007 last year.
This year we won’t know the total until after Christmas, when Ann takes the ornaments off her tree — carefully, one by one, until she has a foot-high snowdrift of colorful plastic and delicate glass on the couch.
Balls and baubles, winged angels and tiny Barbies, spinning Ferris wheels and paddling riverboats, mini-Mr. Potato Heads and little trains on little tracks, singing music boxes, playing pianos, Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz” and Ralphie from “A Christmas Story,” all waiting to be returned to the boxes from which they came.
This is when she does the counting, says the attorney and mother of two, standing stocking-footed in a house made of Christmas.
When she puts the ornaments on the tree — two full weekends, starting at 7 a.m. on a Saturday with a sandwich break at noon and takeout for supper brought in by her husband, Rich (“It’s best to leave her alone when she’s decorating”) — she doesn’t count them.
But each year there seem to be a few more, Ann says on Friday.
She’s peering into the depths of her tree, ornaments five deep on every branch.
Let’s see, the Chatty Cathy ornament is new. “I always wanted one growing up.”
And the silver dollar-sized See-and-Say is new. She pulls its string, and a cow moos.
Funny thing about a tree with at least 1,007 ornaments. It looks full, but not cluttered. Decorated but not DECORATED. Tasteful, not tacky.
But still, it’s at least 1,007 ornaments.
“It’s heavy. If it fell on you, it would do some damage.”
And Ann doesn’t put just any ornament on The Tree. The basement storage room is stacked with ornament-filled boxes that “didn’t make the cut.”
How many? “Well, more,” Ann says. “Just more.”
They know Ann by name at the Hallmark store at the mall, says her daughter, Jessica.
They call her into the storeroom, like ornament drug dealers, to show her the latest shipments before they hit the floor.
True, Ann says.
She also says things like: “It’s gotten way worse than it was before.”
And: “Doesn’t this sound kind of sick?”
And: “It’s fun.”
It’s fun entertaining, the tree in all its holiday glory for guests to see. The kids showing off the tree to their friends. Her sister’s four boys big-eyed around the tree Friday, watching gizmos glow, pushing buttons, hearing Santa’s voice and “The First Noel.”
She has her favorites. She likes ornaments that do things. She likes the plastic Rudolph, an antique like the one her mom had on the family tree. She likes the Santa head her son, Anthony, made in grade school, the one that came laced with candy, which he ate on the bus ride home.
She likes the star her parents brought back from the Holyland and the sun from Mexico.
She likes sitting in the family room in the dark, looking at the tree glow.
The big tree decorating tradition started out small one Christmas so long ago that Ann can’t remember. And then it snowballed. As for the yearly tally, three elderly aunts got her started one December when they were admiring the tree and wondering about the volume of bling.
She was up to about 800 ornaments then, Ann says.
She is in her basement now — beyond the Charlie Brown tree in the corner, and the music box tree in the living room, a fiber optic tree in the dining room, a pencil tree in the bathroom, a 2-foot tree in the guest room surrounded by snowmen, two trees on the china cabinet, two trees on the sun porch — showing off another tree, perfectly decorated with dainty china figurines.
She started with just one figurine. And then another. And then, well, just look at the tree.
Standing in the Christmas house, where upstairs a dangerously heavy tree sounds ready for takeoff, it makes perfect sense.
Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.
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