Vintage metal trees are cool again

By EDWARD ACHORN
PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
Every family has its dark secrets, its shameful episodes it wishes to conceal from a prying world.
For years, I have shielded one of ours -- a legacy from the early 1960s, when America was a vastly self-confident and boldly inventive, but unquestionably weird, place.
In those long-ago days, many children thrilled to the smell of a fresh-cut Christmas tree, sticky with sap and fragrant with the essence of the winter forest. Some happy suburban families made a day of tree-hunting, bundling up and heading out, singing carols, drinking hot cocoa and searching for the perfect specimen.
But, for a period of a few years, our tree was neither felled with an ax nor purchased on a frosty, dark night from a lot festooned with hanging naked light bulbs.
No, our tree came out of a big flat box. And it made a loud hissing and clanking noise when you shook out its disassembled parts.
Our tree, you see, was made of metal. An "Evergleam," I think it was called.
Inside the box was a silver-painted wooden pole with holes drilled in it at varying angles. When you plugged in the wire branches -- each loaded with shiny aluminum "needles" -- the object took on the shape of a 6-foot pine tree.
'Color wheels'
But the shimmering metal tree was only part of the show. We also had two "color wheels," floor-level spotlights that shone through clear plastic wheels divided into segments of red, green, blue and gold. When you switched them on, the wheels rotated, splashing the tree with ever-changing light.
Now, I had always been a bit of a Christmas tree junkie. One of my earliest memories is of sprawling on the living room floor, head nestled against the tree stand, looking up through the branches at the dazzling array of ornaments and lights. In the real-tree days, my mom had used stuff handed down from 20 years or more before -- fat colored bulbs, including some that seemed to make water bubble, all white-hot to the touch. Glorious.
But our shiny new metal tree made all that seem like contemptible, outmoded junk, by comparison.
To me, at the age of 7 or 8, an aluminum Christmas tree was no less a marvel of American ingenuity and scientific know-how than the Gemini program.
You didn't need lights. You didn't need ornaments. You didn't need water. You didn't need to go out in the cold to get it. You didn't need to vacuum up dropped needles. Space-age man had created a better tree! Plus, it shone. It was the definition of hip.
The Sears 1963 Christmas Book captured some of the furious excitement:
"Whether you decorate with blue or red ornaments -- this exquisite tree is sure to be the talk of your neighborhood. High luster aluminum gives a dazzling brilliance. Shimmering silvery branches are swirled and tapered to a handsome realistic fullness. It's really durable ... you can use it year after year."
By then, we had moved to a new house, a modernistic, L-shaped ranch with a massive front window. The tree went right in that window, changing colors for hours -- surely the talk of the Ruseckases and the Delaroches.
I can still hear the grinding, groaning sound of those color wheels turning, and smell the plastic burning over the hot spotlights. For me, those became part of the sounds and smells of the season.
But like all works of true genius in the fashion world, it soon faded.
A Charlie Brown Christmas used metal trees as a symbol of the rank and disgusting commercialization of Jesus' birth. Who could forget Lucy's admonition to the much-despised Charlie Brown? "Get the biggest aluminum tree you can find -- maybe painted pink." Violet adds, with a sneer, "Yeah, do something right for a change."
Authentic Christmas tree
Charlie, of course, bravely defies fashion, and gets a little, humble, needle-dropping, authentic Christmas tree -- symbol of the majesty hidden beneath the impoverished trappings of the baby in the manger.
Not long after, our metal tree was demoted to the windowless basement TV room.
Today, it seems, vintage metal trees are cool again, sold for outrageous prices on e-Bay, as baby boomers, marching toward the grave, cling obsessively to their childhoods, and find a new appreciation for the bold design statements of the 1950s and '60s.
For all the hassle, I prefer the real thing -- though the scent of burning plastic can instantly transport me back to earlier Christmases.
Edward Achorn is deputy editorial pages editor of The Providence Journal. Distributed by Scripps Howard.