Despite the passage of time — 50-plus years ago — Kitty Hess of Lilly said she and her best friend still recall the year when they were both 18 years old.

The two were out on their own, sharing a home, when they decided to buy a real tree.

“We drove to the fruit market in Cresson, picked out the very best tree and put it in the trunk,” Hess wrote. But, the lid would not close.

“For some reason I had a clothesline rope in the trunk,” she said. “We tied the lid closed the best we could but had yards of rope left. So, we ran it through the back windows a few times and my friend held the rest of the rope for the 4-mile trip back home.”

This photo submitted by Holly Blair-Kiss shows her mother, Eileen Blair (second from left), with her grandchildren. Courtesy photo

Once home, though, they found the tree wouldn’t fit in the stand.

“We used the kitchen knife to whittle the trunk,” Hess wrote, and they placed the tree in the traditional corner of the house.

“It was the most crooked tree ever! Being resourceful, we tied it with the drawstring curtain ropes” to keep it upright, she explained.

“We still reminisce all these years later,” she said. “We are both near 70 now and have been best friends since we were 10 years old.”

Science project

This photo submitted by Tracy Cranford shows her dad watching as granddaughter Abby opens a treasured gift. Courtesy photo

Dave Potchak of New Enterprise also shared a tree-stand-related story, which turned out to be a real stinker.

“This old story took place back in the day when almost all families decorated a real Christmas tree that was held in place within a metal stand, using metal screws,” Potchak wrote. “The bottom of the tree rested in a red, metal bowl, so water could be added to prevent the tree from drying out too quickly.”

Admitting to be a “know-it-all age of about 14,” Potchak said he read somewhere that you could enhance the longevity of a Christmas tree by adding a little sugar and bleach to the water in the bowl.

“Within a week, our house began to reek. First Mom noticed a horrid odor; but soon after, each of us were hit too, with what our senses perceived as either cyanide or mustard gas. Mom was apologizing to visitors who dropped by and Christmas Day was coming up quickly,” he wrote.

“We searched everywhere for the cause of that alarming aroma. We blamed the dog, the sewer, and even each other until I crawled under that tree one day and discovered exactly where that aroma was coming from.

“As my burning nostrils and watery eyes got close to the bowl, it dawned on me that I had forgotten to add the bleach to that concoction.

“We laughed about that for years, but Mom would not allow anything but plain water in that metal bowl after that fiasco. And my fermenting mixture became a mere memory,” he said.

‘Because it’s more fun’

Minerva Gordon of Martinsburg recalls Dec. 9, 1972, when her husband had the great idea of going to the woods with the whole family and cutting down a Christmas tree.

“He had been feeling mighty low; it was two weeks before Christmas,” she wrote, and he thought that this outing would put him in the Christmas spirit.

“My husband, Del, is a very tall man. Six feet, three inches to be exact, and feeling the weight of his 44 years,” Gordon said.

That year, he told their youngest, Kimberly, 8, that there was no Santa Claus, she added.

It had been raining all night and that made for a muddy day to go for a tree, Gordon recalled.

“Why do we all have to go,” asked Victor, the couple’s 15-year-old son.

“Because it is more fun, son,” Del told him.

Kimberly began singing “O Christmas Tree” and was excited about the trip to the woods.

Becky, 12, asked if Christmas trees feel pain, with the answer being a “no.”

“Everybody to the car,” Del said, “and Victor, bring the rope and saw.”

“By now Del knows that Victor’s mood is contagious and he is feeling that this is not going to get him in the Christmas spirit,” Gordon said.

But, they went to a farm belonging to friends, with Del parking the car in the middle of a corn field because the ground was very wet.

Victor found a tree at the edge of the evergreens, trying to convince his dad that it was “the perfect one.” But, Del insisted they go deeper into the field of evergreens.

In the end, after wading in the mud and the wet, Victor’s tree was picked.

Victor and Del sawed on the tree until Del decided they could break it off, Gordon said.

Del “puts his 260 pounds to work. Soon both Del and the tree fall to the ground with a loud thump.

“It was tempting to laugh, but we all tried to find out if Del is hurt,” she said.

That experience seemed to break Del out of his gloom, as he “got up with a smile,” she wrote.

Mouse moat

Mary Marin of Altoona won’t ever forget the year she and her husband brought a mouse — or two — into their house.

Five years ago, the couple drove up the mountain in their trusty pickup to cut down their Christmas tree, a tradition 40 years in the making.

After finding the perfect tree, driving home and setting it up in the tree stand, Marin said he crawled under the tree to put water in the stand.

“To my surprise, sitting on a branch, as surprised to see me as I was to see him, was a fieldmouse,” she wrote.

“He ran up the tree and I flew out from under the tree, water flying everywhere,” she said.

When her husband asked what was wrong, she yelled that there was a mouse in the tree.

“This mouse managed to stay in the tree after the noise of the chainsaw, being shook in the tree wrapping machine and tossed in the pickup and bounced down the mountain,” she said.

But, the mouse was no match for her.

“I gathered up every mouse trap I could find. When my husband came home from a meeting he started to laugh at what I had done,” she wrote. “He said it looked like a mouse moat under and around the tree.”

It worked, though, as the next morning she caught not one but two mice in the traps.

“My husband, through his laughter, said ‘you caught them, you get rid of them,'” she wrote, adding that “I picked up the traps and carried them at arms length up to the garden where I buried them under the snow.”

“We now have an artificial tree,” she said.

Canceling Christmas

“My father was a pastor. He retired in 2023,” wrote Holly Blair-Kiss of Altoona, laying out the premise for her Christmas story.

During the arctic blast of 2022, her parents were living in Kingwood, West Virginia, and Blair-Kiss and her siblings, and their families, traveled there for a traditional family Christmas.

“Temperatures hovered at 10 below in some places. A winter storm moved in and created havoc for every member who had to travel to West Virginia. My poor mother tried to cancel; said we would reschedule. We have three nurses in our family — we do not reschedule,” she said.

“So, over the river, and through the woods, to Nana’s house we go” — quite literally, as her nephew drove from Erie, arriving first.

“My sister, Wendy, drove from Ohio. Her son-in-law and daughter were driving a front-wheel Toyota Camry with broken windshield wipers. Their trip took 10 hours. (It normally takes four hours). … That was largely in part because they had to keep stopping to clean the windshield,” she said.

Despite living in Morgantown, West Virginia, Blair-Kiss’ brother and his family arrived last. “Make that make sense,” she said.

“My husband, Dan, and our two boys left in the afternoon. We had to contend with (Routes) 219 and 68. But Dan learned to drive in the winter in Windber, Somerset County. I knew we were safe.”

But, when they awoke on Christmas Eve, the Blair-Kiss family had a flat tire.

To add to that luck, as they headed back to Pennsylvania later that day, their neighbors called in a panic, stating there was white smoke coming out of the side of their house.

Fortunately, there was no fire. “They were looking at the chimney side of my house and it was so cold outside (-6) that they mistook the furnace exhaust as smoke,” she said.

Nevertheless, “We were never more thankful to have made it to West Virginia, then we were to make it back to Altoona. … My mom doesn’t remember the year she tried to cancel Christmas, and maybe that’s for the best.”

The gift that wasn’t

“This goes back to 1969 or 1970,” wrote JoAnn Johnston of Hollidaysburg.

“As was the custom, customers to a beauty salon always gave their beautician a Christmas gift. Ten of us worked together in a large room, so everyone was privy to see and hear what was going on or being said,” she wrote.

One Christmas, her client gave her a package that ended up being a bit unusual in more ways than one.

“I unwrapped it and gasped at the beautiful coral fabric of what was obviously a negligee,” she wrote, but then, as she held it up, “I noticed a large diaper safety pin holding the shoulder strap on. Next I noticed many snags all over the item, then some stains down the front.”

Her customer “was trying to pass off her very much used nightie. … Two chairs down, the stylist John, who had been doing her hair the Christmas before, said, ‘Oh yeah, last year she gave me one of her husband’s ties, wrinkled from being tied, food stains down the front.”

One for the books

Years ago, Deb Colledge of Altoona experienced a Christmas Eve to remember when she heard a boom in the middle of the night and saw lights shining through her bedroom window.

“I leaped from my bed and looked out on the street as I was sure an UFO had suddenly appeared,” she wrote. “Instead it was a car smashed up against the front porch.”

When she woke her dad to tell him what happened, he told her she was dreaming, but “I kept shaking him so he finally arose from his bed and looked out on the porch. Indeed, there was a car smashed up against the front porch.”

In pajamas and barefooted, he ran on to the porch and a woman ran from the car and down the street.

“My Dad hollered ‘Stop.’ But she did not, so my dad in his pajamas and barefooted ran down the street. By this time everyone was up, so we called the police,” she said.

Ten minutes later her Dad returned, cold and shivering from his run up Broad Avenue. He didn’t catch her because he ran to 38th Street and, after climbing Broad Avenue hill, realized he was barefooted and in pajamas.

The police did find the woman, Colledge said, noting the woman was drunk and had driven through the neighbor’s front lawn, fence and was stopped by the front porch.

“My Dad developed a terrible cold a few days later. And of course he had to endure teasing from relatives that he liked to run in the middle of the night in pajamas and barefooted. The real teasing he endured was the fact he could not catch a drunk woman running through the street. It was a Christmas Eve to remember,” she said.

Havoc-free holiday

Frances Robine of Altoona was living in Florida in 2018 when her husband decided they and their adult children should experience a Christmas in Pennsylvania. Snow, cold weather, less or no gifts, fewer activities and an old- fashioned Christmas dinner.

They ended up staying in a condo on top of Blue Knob mountain, Claysburg.

The trip was uneventful, and using a gift certificate to a grocery store in Johns­town, they found the perfect turkey and all the fixings, including a pumpkin pie.

Church services were attended, Christmas carols were sung and the snow blanketed the ground.

They visited family in the area, enjoyed each other’s company and played games.

“We toasted to a perfect Christmas and evening,” she said.

Gifts that keep giving

Tracy Cranford, who grew up in Claysburg, has many memories of Christmases past, including this one which embodies the spirit of the season. For Cranford’s complete accounting, and others in this grouping, see the full story online at altoonamirror.com.

“I don’t understand. What am I looking at?”

Both of my parents eyed me expectantly, as I sat at the end of the couch beside the Christmas tree, a small, elongated gift box in my hands. By the shape of the package, I had expected to unwrap a watch but instead, there I sat holding a picture of a diamond-studded bracelet that had obviously been scissored out of a magazine.

Dad laughed and then turned to my children sitting on the floor behind him.

“What did you get, Allie?” he asked.

My oldest daughter sat with the same confused expression on her face and a paper clipping between her fingers.

“It’s a Barbie dream house,” her tiny voice uttered.

“How about you, Brian?” He looked over at my husband, who was holding a cut-out of a new Ford F-150.

“A truck.”

My mother stood smiling.

“Let me see it,” she said, leaning over his shoulder and glancing at the image.

“Oh, that’s nice,” she said.

“What’s going on?” I asked again.

That’s when my father, with a whimsical grin on his face, rubbed his chin and said, “That’s what we’d have bought for you if we’d had the money.”

My parents eyed each other knowingly and both started laughing. My daughters, surprisingly not disappointed, erupted with belly laughs like they’d just been the butt of the cleverest prank.

So were the days of Christmas.

Every year, my parents would dream up some new shenanigan concocted by their loaded and creative imaginations. I pictured them sitting in the kitchen spending hours (not money) with scissors and open magazines spread across the table, chuckling in anticipation of the laughs they’d get when we opened our priceless gifts.

What my father said was true, though. My parents never had much money; it was just something they didn’t value. Instead, they focused on making holidays and special occasions memorable in more prolific and often comical ways.

Case in point, my very first and favorite memory of Christmas morning took place when I was around four or five years old. My uncle Koonie, a man I admittedly sometimes feared because of his tough outward appearance and manic unpredictable behavior, was popping in for a visit. We sat toasty and warm by a woodburning stove in our cozy single-wide trailer, waiting for him to arrive and I distinctly remember the excitement my father struggled to contain.

He was filled with eagerness, anxiously pacing the floor, when Koonie finally knocked and my mom let him in.

As my uncle sat there in a wooden rocker beside the tree, a widebrimmed straw hat on his head, my father passed him a neatly wrapped gift.

Koonie shook it, then ripped off the paper to see a plain white shirt box.

“Oh, I just wonder what it could be!” he mocked, poking fun at my parents’ seemingly dull selection that year and quite positive the box contained a shirt of some sort.

“Open it!” my dad pressed, an oddly wild look in his eyes.

Koonie pulled the tape loose on both sides but didn’t remove the top of the box. Instead, in a playful manner, he jested “Oh it couldn’t be a shirt, now, could it?”

He pushed his hand inside to explore, never peeking under the lid, when a look of shock struck his face at the unexpected feel of a long rubber snake coiled up inside. What’s important to know here is that ever since Koonie was a child, he’d harbored an extreme and irrational fear of snakes; he couldn’t bear to even see one on TV without turning away or changing the channel.

In an instant, he ripped the box wide open, shrieked like a banshee, and threw the contents of his lap into the side of the Christmas tree knocking ornaments loose, as he scrambled to run in the opposite direction. The tree tilted, nearly falling over, the old rocker toppled onto its side, and the front door was flung wide open in a moment of panic. Koonie raced down the snowcovered steps while my father stood in the doorway exhibiting his signature wheezing laugh.

The following year, my parents devised a comparable surprise for my Uncle Lee when they gifted him a pocket-sized box containing a crusted white dog turd that had undoubtedly aged to perfection over the course of several months in the outside dog lot. I watched from the window as my father took time and care in selecting just the right poo that day, all the while wearing his Santa hat and singing Feces Navidad.

Then, later that evening, there comes the vision of my dear sick uncle leaning over our front porch banister, vomiting incessantly after opening his gift. When my father went out to check on him, the sight started a chain reaction that sent him spewing as well. And there it was, prettier than any picture cutout I could have received: Christmas 1979 with the Dueling Retchers.

Looking back, I wonder what caused my parents to unearth these extraordinary ideas that stand out like shining gems in the dirt path leading away from my childhood years. Sure, they shared an excellent sense of humor, but I think it was more than that. It was perhaps a rebellion against the whole insane commercialized tradition that overtook America and the rest of the world at Christmastime.

We’d always had plenty to eat, a warm and loving home, but never exorbitant riches. And let’s face it; most everyone we knew was in the same theoretical boat. Instead of following the multitude of folks who recklessly spent what they didn’t have each year, borrowing and buying their way into amassing hordes of debt, passing out fancy expensive gifts as their boats slowly sank, my father sat in his little boat and fired buckshot at all the gaudy retail stores racking up sales on shore.

However, when December 25th drew near, we celebrated the holidays in other traditional ways. My mother decorated the house with wreaths and mistletoe, we ventured out on cold blustery nights and sang Christmas carols to our neighbors, and we left cookies on the table for Santa.

Then, lo and behold, we would gather around the television each Christmas Eve, where we would watch the same old beloved Andy Griffith Christmas Story whose script my dad could recite line by perfect line in its entirety. At the end of each show, our eyes would tear up as Ben Weaver peered longingly from an outside alley through the bars of a window, overcome with loneliness on Christmas Eve, as he watched joyous festivities unfolding inside and wished he could be a part of them.

Discreetly, I’d glance over and catch a glimpse of my dad’s soft and serious side that he usually kept hidden, wondering about the marvelous layers of emotion that comprised such a complex man who was always searching for a laugh.

The next morning would find us awake bright and early, ready to open playful, preposterous gifts that held enough shock value to take us into the New Year. And I dare not pick a favorite.

Could it be the year I thought I was getting a new microwave but instead received a heavy, sawed-off wood stump in a large box, my parents’ version of “Log” as advertised in a silly commercial from The Ren and Stimpy Show?

Or could it be the year I opened a package to find a dirty, moldy baby’s shoe?

“What in the world?” I questioned.

“Why? Just why?”

My father, delighted, explained that he’d been deer hunting deep in the woods the week before and found that baby shoe lying in a densely wooded area.

“Ain’t that strange? It was just the weirdest thing to see out in the middle of the woods, and I thought There’s a gift for Trace.”

I didn’t want to poke a hole in his joy-inflated balloon by asking if he thought this shoe might possibly be tangible evidence from some sort of crime scene and perhaps should be analyzed by the authorities, so I folded the tissue paper back around it and just said, “Thanks then.”

Later, I threw the shoe in the trash, wondering if he wasn’t becoming a bit unhinged.

So, here’s the thing about my dad. He lived his whole life with this nagging fear that there was never going to be enough money at hand to cover the next emergency that would undoubtedly arise, and he wanted us to be equally prepared. Therefore, he’d plead with us year after year, “Don’t spend your money on me; I don’t need anything!”

He knew the value of a dollar and, for him, each of those dollars did not come easily.

He saw straight through the transparency of commercials, catalogues and sales ads, instead prioritizing the value of just being together at Christmas.

That’s all my dad ever wanted.

Last Christmas Eve, our family sat quietly in my parents’ house while four miles down the road, my dad’s grave was being carved into the earth.

I had only to imagine his voice singing ‘Oh Holy Night’ in deep baritone or asking me to top off his mug with some fresh coffee to know how empty the holidays would be from now on.

I lingered as I washed my hands in the bathroom sink, pretending he was still sitting right around the corner in his recliner and would announce at any minute that the bathroom better be cleared out, he’s “gotta go.”

Afterward, when I returned home to my own house, the claws of grief dug in deeper, and I set to cleaning like I’d never cleaned before. Going through my youngest daughter’s room, I pulled the drawer of her nightstand open that contained years’ worth of her most valued treasures. Among them was a tiny little box adorned with a bow. The label said “To: Abby, From: Pappy. Merry Christmas.”

Inside, lovingly wrapped in tissue paper lay the small bushy tail of a flying squirrel that the cat killed and left on my parents’ porch one winter, undoubtedly one of her favorite gifts from anyone ever.

I marveled how my daughter knew the value of this precious keepsake enough to save it and regretted that I threw away my moldy baby shoe.

This holiday season, I will miss things that I had always thought were unremarkable. I’ll miss the way he’d mute MyPillow commercials or sing “Liberty, Liberty, Li-Ber-Tee” for others. I’ll miss, “Boy my feet hurt” or “Doesn’t anybody else think it’s cold in here?”

I’ll miss him standing in long johns snacking on cold turkey and stuffing from Christmas dinner or dragging empty boxes down to the burn barrel after gifts were exchanged, announcing, “Okay now let’s get this mess all cleaned up.”

He was happiest during those moments when he knew we had the rest of the day to simply enjoy one another without the formalities of passing presents around.

This year, I’m apprehensive about the holidays as I cautiously watch them approaching, drawing slowly near, certain they will bite.

Perhaps the scariest part is knowing that every year for the rest of my life, I will be perpetually trapped inside that episode of the Andy Griffith Christmas Story. I will be Ben Weaver, standing on that upturned box in the alley on Christmas Eve. With haunting, tear-filled eyes, I will clutch the bars on the window as I helplessly watch the past unfold in a warm, unreachable room, a place where my dad stands laughing. He won’t notice my silent heartbreak or see that my lips are mouthing the words to days long past.

More than anything in the world, I’ll wish I could go inside, join him there for a little while and tell him how much I’ve always enjoyed his presence.