Dad’s Gift: Tradition and a Legacy

She is the only one of my three children old enough to recall her father’s zealous pursuit of perfection each year during the annual ritual of Christmas tree shopping.

In his absence, the mantle has come to rest on her shoulders, making her the keeper of a family tradition that has its roots in her father’s childhood. Over the years she has heard the story so often that she now can tell it in dramatic detail: how her father’s heart sank every Christmas Eve when his dad slunk home with another wispy, bedraggled tree that looked like something the cat dragged in.

Maybe his father was too busy or too broke, with five children to support. Maybe it just wasn’t a priority. But every year his dad waited until Christmas Eve, then headed for whichever tree lot would allow him to take one of its leftovers home for free.

They were skinny trees with bent trunks and spindly branches and gaping holes. Trees so ugly, so scrawny, so misshapen, their deficiencies could not be covered with handfuls of tinsel or glittery ornaments.

They looked nothing like the pictures on the Christmas cards, nothing even like the trees in the neighbors’ homes. To hear him tell the story, the trees of his childhood would make Charlie Brown’s scraggly tree look grand. And every Christmas Eve ended with him in tears.

So the tree became, to him, more than a Christmas symbol; it became an emblem of a child deprived. And it fueled a grown man’s determination that his own children would have, if not the perfect evergreen, at least a Christmas tree that would make them proud.

Every December he’d lead our family up and down the rows at our local tree lot, examining each tree scrupulously, looking for its hidden flaws. Alongside him was our oldest daughter, learning the fine points of tree-picking from her dad.

It didn’t have to be large, and it couldn’t be expensive. It just had to be lush and green and shaped like a perfect triangle. And when we’d haul it home and set it up, it would stand without ornaments for days so we’d have a chance to admire it in all its unadorned beauty . . . the prize of a man who’d accomplished more than his father, who had managed to do his family proud.

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Our oldest was 8 when her father died, six years ago . . . one week after he’d picked his final Christmas tree. Her sisters were only 3 and 5. We stumbled through that holiday season, numb from the shock of unexpected loss.

And when the next Christmas rolled around, chief among the holiday duties I dreaded was picking the family Christmas tree. I wasn’t sure any of us could take the pain of trekking through the tree lot alone, without Dad to lead the charge.

I tried to sell the children on a new tradition. How about we head for one of those cut-your-own farms, where we’d chop down a tree? Or maybe we should opt for a potted evergreen, a sort of living memorial to their daddy.

But they longed for the comfort of our familiar routine. And sure enough, our trip turned into a disaster. We vacillated, bickered . . . nothing was good enough, it seemed.

By the time we finished, all four of us were on the verge of tears. And we drove home, with a tree we were sure Daddy would have hated, strapped unsteadily to the roof of our car.

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It has gotten easier every year, as our attachment to the notion of the perfect tree is diminished by the passage of time, fading with our memories. No tears accompany our search these days.

Still, it is clear my eldest takes her role seriously. Last weekend I watched her as she carefully surveyed each tree, while her sisters played hide-and-seek among the rows of evergreens.

“How about this one,” I asked, snatching a tree at random and thrusting it toward her with hands shaking from the cold. She narrowed her eyes, ruffled the branches, then shook her head and strode away. “Daddy would have a heart attack if we got a tree like that,” she said.

Daddy already had a heart attack, I wanted to remind her. Can’t we just pick a tree and go home?

Then I realized that her father’s obsession has become her own; that my child is the keeper of this tradition, handed down from her dad, apart from me.

That it still is not easy for her to move through a holiday season that robbed her of her father’s love. And that holding fast to something he deemed important may well be her way of keeping him near.

So the tree she chose to grace our home this year--so tall, it brushes against the ceiling; so lush, it makes the room look small--is more than just a perfect tree. It is her father’s legacy.

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Sandy Banks’ column runs on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.