MEMORY LANE: "I cannot trim the Christmas tree without thinking of my father, who always had a method. For him there was a right way and a wrong way to do everything... He had a method for attending baseball games and another for viewing the St. Patrick's Day parade. He had a method for riding a bike - a good one, which he taught me, even though he himself had never ridden a bike... We children noticed that it was not just we who called on him for help. Whenever adults got in impossible jams, my father became their Emergency Weapon. He was always helping more introverted, hysterical relatives in and out of cars, hospitals, mental institutions, funeral parlors and tax offices. He and his four brothers (he was the baby of the line) were practical guys who got things done. Like many practical people, they had little to say. My mother and her sister could talk for hours about God-knew-what, but my father and his brothers seldom communicated to one another or to anyone else. It was wasn't their maleness that made them taciturn, I knew that. Their mother, my grandmother, never had anything to say either. Once, at a birthday party for one of my sisters, the flames atop the birthday candle spread to the paper tablecloth. Grandma, silent as ever, her stout frame swaddled in perpetual black, rose from her chair with the speed of any Olympic runner and swatted those flames with her brick-heavy black pocketbook. Bam, bam! My mother returned from the kitchen to find the cake smashed and a dozen little girls in tears. "There was a fire, Margaret," said Grandma, who looked very much like George Washington, once more resuming her seat and her Mount Rushmore silence. Practical. Not especially graceful. But practical. My father, the gentlest of the bunch of brothers, was the only one who could be called a gentleman. He was tough, all right, and like his brothers made for anything. But he dressed more gravely, moved more smoothly, talked more sonorously than they. He even had a playful side, though it was one he displayed only within the confines of his family... My favorite story of my father is the one he told me about the Christmas of 1940, my first Christmas. He had had to work till Christmas Eve night, returning home with his well-earned bonus and picking up a Christmas tree along the way. When he reached the tree lot, however, there was only one left. A large, imperious lady had already entered into negotiations for it. She didn't care to pay full price because she really didn't really want such a large tree. Dad promptly inserted himself into the haggle, offering to pay half and then divide the tree with the lady. Perfect, said she, provided only she should have the fuller half. Together they purchased the tree, which my father lugged to her garage. There, her husband sawed it in half. The moment the trunk snapped in two, my father picked up the top half - now a perfect little tree - wished the couple a merry Christmas and took off. As he turned the corner, he glanced back to see the two just beginning to appreciate the strange, pointless bush the woman had so greedily insisted on. Mary, my second sister and my parents' fourth child, was born in 1948 on December 23. Since there was no chance my mother would be home for Christmas Eve, I was called upon to stand in for her when, after the children were put to bed, the tree was decorated and the presents set forth. Before she left for the hospital, my mother counseled me to be grown-up and helpful in my new role, but I, nearly nine, had no need of anyone's encouragement. The adulthood to be conferred by staying up was a pleasure beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. What I remember of that night is not the presents we laid out for my brother and sister, sleeping unawares in a bedroom down the hall. Nor can I remember what St. Nicholas left for me to rediscover in the morning. What I remember is the quiet and the joy of working through the hours of darkness with my father. The great task was the trimming of the tree --and of course, he had a method. First, the electric bulbs, which had to be set well within the branches, so that their cords would not show and their lights would not be bald but refracted and mysterious. Next, the ornaments; and last, the tinsel icicles, which had to be hung strand by strand, not flung vulgarly in clumps as impatient, tasteless fathers did. Gradually, as we labored together, the tree assumed its annual splendor, which would awe my siblings on the morrow. Many years later I learned that my father had never had a Christmas tree in his own childhood. His parents were immigrants, and his father died in a road construction accident when my father, baby Patrick, was but a few weeks old. My silent grandmother took in washing, often faced eviction and one day, in desperation, even placed my father's older brothers in an orphanage. But she returned to take them back the same day, and from that time they somehow squeaked by. My father, who became quite deaf after a serious childhood illness, was taken to be a dunce by his teachers. He was saved from academic extinction by a kindly, perceptive nun who tutored him for a high school scholarship, a course that would eventually make him his family's only college graduate, but he struggled against the deafness all his life. He once told me, during a crisis in my life, that all he had ever wanted to be was a father. I don't know, but perhaps that keen desire marshaled his abilities, as a magnet marshals iron filings, so that he was able to accomplish tasks he had no models and no preparation for. At any rate, that Christmas of the tree-trimming was nearly 50 years ago, and this past summer my father was taken from us. For many years I trimmed a tree for my own children and, more recently, instructed them in the art. As I look back, my father's method seems true art, beginning in ritual and devotion and ending in a great symbol, set in our midst, of our mysterious relation to one another - father to son, brother to sister, husband to wife, friend to friend, generation upon generation. To me the annual rite is a kind of token in the splendor and the painful beauty of the universe itself." -- Excerpts, Thomas Cahill, "My Father's Perfect Christmas - now it's mine." "Reader's Digest" magazine Dec 1998