Two Trees For Christmas?

Two Trees for Christmas?

When Joseph woke up, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded and took Mary as his wife.

Matthew 1:24

Mike Royko was a popular newspaper columnist in Chicago for more than thirty years. Like many columnists Royko created fictitious mouthpieces with whom he could “converse,” the most famous being Slats Grobnik, the epitome of the working class Polish Chicagoan.

In one column, Royko tells the story of how every December, Slats Grobnik would sell Christmas trees in Chicago. And one year, so the story goes, he met a couple that was on the hunt for just the right tree:

The guy was skinny with a big bulging Adam’s apple and a small, receding chin. She was kind of pretty. But the two of them were wearing ragged clothes that looked like they’d come from the Salvation Army store. They didn’t have much, it was clear. Grobnik walked along with them as they found most of the trees in his collection far too expensive.

Eventually, they settled on a Scotch pine that was okay on one side, but pretty bare on the other. And then, a little further along, they picked up another tree that was hardly any better—full on one side, Charlie-Brown-scraggly on the other.

A few days later, Slats was out walking on the street when he happened to glance up through a picture window into a ground-floor apartment where he saw an absolutely spectacular tree. It was beautiful—full and thick and luscious. Then he was shocked as he saw come into the window view the couple that he’d sold the lousy trees to.

Curiosity got the best of him, so he went up to the door, knocked, and started up a conversation. He had to know where they had gotten that beautiful tree. They told him how they’d come home with the two scraggly trees he’d sold and worked them together where the branches were thin. It had been difficult to get the branches interlaced; they had to use wire to bind the two trunks together. But with time and effort and the grace of God, they found a way to overlap the branches. The trees were now so thick and rich you could not even see the wires.

“So that’s the secret,” said Grobnik. “You take two trees that aren’t perfect, that might even be homely, that maybe nobody else would want, but if you put them together just right, then sometimes you can make something really beautiful.”^a

You don’t have to be a poet or a psychologist to see the analogy of this story. The beauty of marriage is achieved when two imperfect people come together and commit themselves to each other and to God.

There has been only one Christmas—the rest are anniversaries.

—W. J. Cameron

^a 188