Like most of the kids in our neighborhood, my twin brother and I eagerly counted down the days until Christmas, by doing our homework, eating our all of our vegetables and cleaning our rooms, without being asked, in a desperate attempt to earn extra points with Santa Claus. 

However, we were perhaps the only family in town without a tree. 

"Not until Christmas Eve."

We would sit and sulk in the back of our station wagon, on the way to the laundromat, or coming back home from food shopping, as our folks marveled at other people's houses, every weekend.  Still.  No tree.

"In Hungary, kids had to wait until after midnight for the Christmas Angel."

Oh, there were plenty of stories.  About trees and drunken angels.  Like, the year my grandfather decided to celebrate Christmas on the way home from work, tripped on the entrance of their small apartment and dropped their tree...decorations and all.

"It was the Angel, I tell you, I saw it drinking on the trolley!"

I'm sure my grandmother didn't appreciate my grandfather's dry sense of humor, just as much as my brother and I couldn't understand my father's excitement at finding a pair of socks, or a foil wrapped orange under their Christmas tree.

Still.  We listened and it made my father miss them both, all the more.

"Daddy's home and he's got our tree!"

My father worked for a landscaper and for years sold Christmas trees, in the parking lot of a garden center, before being laid-off for the winter.

"It's beautiful, Daddy!"

If you were to ask me what Christmas gift I remember the most, thirty-something years ago, I would have answered the Barbie Country Camper.

"Your grandmother would have loved such a tree."

Today, it's stories of drunken Christmas Angels and lopsided tabletop trees that help make Christmastime special for me...and my family.

Just like Dad.

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