Our Sentimental Christmas Tree

The Fraser fir is wrapped in colorful twinkling lights and decorated with keepsake ornaments that hold the family’s history, each one with its own story.

- Lee Smith

EVERY YEAR, you can read our Christmas tree like a big old Southern novel. It’s all about where we are from, who our people were, who we were, and who we are now. Almost every ornament tells a story.

But let’s start with the tree, which is always real and always big, usually from one of those choose-and-cut tree farms in the mountains of beautiful Ashe County, North Carolina. We buy a large one for the front porch, too, illuminated by strands and strands of those old-fashioned round colored lights, which prompted a famous matriarch of the town to stop me on the street when we moved in 20 years ago and announce severely, “My deah, you should nevah use colored lights on your historic home. Nevah!” She rapped me on the shoulder, hard, and swept away.

Well, I did it anyway, and I am still doing it. We put colored lights on every Christmas tree we’ve got, and we’ve got them everywhere—on the front porch, on the back porch, in the den, in the kitchen—and, of course, there’s the big one situated between the dining room and the living room, the special one that is covered with the keepsake ornaments that hold our history.

The handmade Appalachian ornaments come from my own childhood spent in the coal mining town of Grundy, Virginia, home of my father, Ernest Smith. He eloped with my beautiful mother, Virginia Marshall (nicknamed “Gig”), married her on Christmas Eve 1930, and brought her home to his beloved mountains. Though it was a great love match, she would always miss Chincoteague Island, her childhood home off Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Mama is represented by a little carved Chincoteague pony—and by her own measuring spoons, for she was also a home economics teacher and a famous cook.