This week I noticed the evergreen trees lined up in front of the grocery store, and it reminded me of the Christmas tree that Lyle and I chose the first year we were married. We were living in Timnath then. Lyle was attending CSU, and I was teaching at Highland High School in Ault, Colorado. We were poor. (Can you believe that my yearly salary was $4,200 in those days?)

Anyway, when Christmas came around, we got a permit to cut a tree — I think for something like two or three dollars. I can’t remember where we went to cut the tree, but it was close to Fort Collins. We parked the car, climbed up a hill, and we were in an area filled with evergreen trees.

There was a great selection of trees of a variety of sizes, any kind of tree that a person might want. However, what we spotted was a slender tree of maybe a little over five feet. It was scrawny-looking, indeed. Someone had cut the tree and then gone off and left it lying on the ground.

We stood the tree up and looked it over. There were big spaces between some of the branches. Ridiculous as it may seem, we felt sorry for the tree, and we thought it was just the right Christmas tree for us. We picked up some branches that people had trimmed off their trees and pulled it all to the car.

At home we stood the tree up, Lyle got his drill, and he drilled holes in the trunk of the tree where it was lacking branches. He filled the spaces with boughs that we had picked up, and pretty soon we had a pretty good-looking Christmas tree.

Next we went to the 99 Cent Store in Fort Collins where we purchased a string of lights, a couple boxes of ornaments, some rope, tinsel and an angel that was identical to the one that spent each season on the top of my childhood family Christmas tree. We decorated our first tree that we thought to be beautiful.

There was one problem, however. We had a young gray housecat named Dini, (short for Houdini). Lyle had found him for me in Sterling, where we lived or a couple of months following our marriage, before moving to Timnath.

So guess what happened next…

Dini was fascinated with the tree. He enjoyed sleeping under it when the tree was lit up. The first night, after we had gone to bed, Dini decided to climb up in the tree.

One of the attached branches fell with Dini, and its ornaments scattered around. I found the mess and put everything back, but after that I had to keep an eye on Dini, mostly at night. It wasn’t the first time he had branches all over the place.

I think Dini might have even knocked the whole tree over one time. A “knocked over” tree just doesn’t look the same after it has been put back together.

There have been over 50 Christmas trees in our family since then. Dini lived to a ripe old age, and I don’t remember that he ever bothered a tree after that first “kitten” year. We never rescued an abandoned evergreen tree since that year, either.