Our Griswold Family Christmas Tree

One man's quest for the biggest tree in Fayette County circa 1987

Merry Christmas to you, dear reader.

I hope you are waking from your long winter’s nap, ready to celebrate Christmas in ways that only your family can. Maybe your turkey is in the oven. Or the prime rib. Or maybe you follow the now established tradition of going out for Chinese. I did that once in NYC and will always remember it with a smile. Whatever your traditions, I hope you are doing them with the buttress of a good night’s sleep.

Myself, I was up most of the night and I blame The Seven Fishes. My husband and I attended a gorgeously traditional seafood extravaganza run by old school Italians who know how to do it right. Deep fried shrimp and calamari. Crab cakes and lobster risotto. Pan fried perch in white wine and lemon. And baccala, the infamous fish that needs to be soaked for three days before anyone wants to eat it. Except someone dropped the baccala. So, it was really The Six Fishes.

I ate all the fishes. And then I couldn’t get to sleep. So, I finally gave up and decided to write you a very early Christmas morning story.

This is your last reminder to take advantage of the 200th post discount which expires on New Years Eve. Become that rare reader who helps me keep writing…the paid subscriber.

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Our Sager Family Christmas Tree

Let me rewind my memory and take you back to the year 1987. Or maybe 1988. I pinpoint the time by inspecting our hairstyles in the photos.

My father had a few things in common with Clark W. Griswold, that benevolent patriarch with a heart of gold. The biggest similarity was his wanting everyone to come to the party. All the parties. Every year he would agree to the let’s keep it small this time, Jeff. And then he would make a call, and the dinner guests would balloon like kittens dropped off on the back porch. Relatives, neighbors, sometimes guests that no one had ever met.

The modern addition living room to our 1803 stone farmhouse had a very high, cathedral ceiling. Thinking back on it now, I think it was the twenty-two-foot ceiling that is the real story. I think our father took the height as a challenge to be met.

How can I find a tree to fit this space?

I was in the truck that day, so I got to witness the cutting and topping of a full-size blue spruce that had outgrown a nearby yard. Our father was doing someone a favor while also acquiring the largest Christmas tree anyone of us had ever seen.

Unlike Clark, Jeff Sager did not forget the saw.

And he did not forget the flatbed trailer that was necessary to get it home.

There were no branches breaking through windows or a squirrel with this Sager Family Christmas tree. Although in our remembering, we all agree that we found some kind of nest. The room was big enough, in fact the room and the tree fit each other perfectly. I don’t remember anyone measuring it, but it must have come in at twenty feet minimum. Our uncle welded a special steel stand for it. My sister was lifted up into the rafters to place her homemade one-eyed paper angel at the top. It took six men to get it in, then realize that it was too tall and take it back out to re-cut the trunk.

But my favorite part comes about ten minutes after the men had squeezed it through the double doors, set it into its heavy stand and clipped the ropes that held its branches together. They were called away to a neighbor’s wood stove emergency and left my mother and siblings to witness the rain.

You see, our tree had sat outside for a day of winter rain followed by a hard freeze. It was covered, tip to branch with ice. And as the ice thawed, we watched as the room began to rain onto my mother’s brand-new oak floorboards. What followed was the best kind of panic. Running to all corners of the house to track down every bath towel, bathmat, and cotton rag, anything that would soak up the buckets of water that were showering into the living room.

See the photo below for comparison. This was not the giant tree, but another, slightly smaller version. The real one had to be forcibly squeezed through the open French doors. I can see by my age, note me in the white toboggan, that this was not the monster tree.

Once we got the rain sorted, we ran out of decorations. We had to buy more twinkle lights. But the thrill of hearing our Christmas visitor’s gasp when they witnessed the Sager Family Christmas tree is the reason they call it nostalgia.

Merry Christmas to all of us.

I look forward to spending time with you between these pages in 2025.