December 2004 Ensign - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day ...

60
The Appalachian
Christmas Tree
By Laurie Hopkins
Christmas of 1977 was not a
happy one for me. No family
members were close enough
to visit, we had almost no money,
and we had no pretty decorations to
boost my spirits—only a scraggly little
Christmas tree strung with colored
paper and popcorn chains. If
not for the wide-eyed hope of our
small children, I probably wouldn’t
even have bothered with the tree.
My husband had to drive our car
about 45 minutes to get
to work, taking with him
our only means of transportation.
I was stuck at
home all day, every day,
miles away from anything
and everything. The nearest
town was a 20-minute
drive over insanely twisting
mountain roads. The
chapel and most of the
members of our tiny
branch were nearly an hour away.
We had moved to this isolated
Appalachian valley in a spasm of
youthful idealism and adventurousness.
My husband heard of cheap
land in Virginia, and before I could
say, “Middle of nowhere,” we had
moved there. He built us a little
house on the side of a mountain, with
water piped in from a nearby spring.
Isomehow
managed
to balance
the tree and the
children without
major mishap and
arrived safely at
the cabin door.
We did have neighbors,
though they were few and
far between. The closest
house was an 1801 log cabin, rented
for a short while by a young family
from our branch, the Andersons
(names have been changed). They
were poor like we were. Donald, the
dad, was working six and sometimes
seven days a week. Donald and Ruth
had three small children, as we did,
and Ruth was in a constant state of
exhaustion.
It was a fairly precarious hike from
my house to Ruth’s, over a deeply
rutted, muddy road. For either of us—
with a baby in our arms and two
small children in tow—visits were a
bit tricky. On one of our rare visits,
however, Ruth mentioned to me
that they hadn’t been able to get a
Christmas tree. Donald left home
before dawn and didn’t get back until
late evening. Ruth just wasn’t up to
traipsing about the countryside in
search of a tree.