"It is a fine line between tacky and treasure, and I know where it is," I said.
"Everyone thinks they do," she said.
One man's treasure is one woman's tacky.
Everyone has opinions. Only he has the memory.
Christmas is mostly about childhood memories, either your own or those that parents make for their children. And memories are about getting transported to the past largely by sight and sound.
So these are the tacky and treasured memories of a boy, 10 to 12, and of a shiny six-foot silver tinfoil Christmas tree with a grinding, creaking color wheel aimed smartly from the side.
These are the mid-1960s, when the '50s aren't really quite over and the revolutions of the late '60s aren't quite born.
The Razorbacks are winning. Radio station KAAY, the Mighty 1090 with 50,000 watts of power, is bringing the world through a transistor radio. We're all living in our own Mayberrys, coping as best we can with Dallas.
Christmas means lying on your stomach on dark December evenings on the hardwood living room floor of a two-bedroom, one-bath house. It means propping your head on your palms and gazing, mesmerized, on the aluminum tree, framed by the picture window that is itself framed by a taped string of blinking lights.
It means watching the tinfoil steadily change colors from to red to blue and two unrecalled others.
It means a meditative, near-hypnotic state as the color wheel grinds round and round with that rhythmically undulating creak suggesting the wheel needs oiling or replacing.
It is a sound that is the defining Christmas music of your youth.
You imagine passers-by regaled by the vision of your home. But you're living in a flat-topped house at the end of a dead-end gravel lane. There are no passers-by.
So this display exists almost exclusively for you and your imagination, and also for your kid sister and hers.
Christmas can also be about the boy becoming an old man and trying to recapture that youthful rapture. Or maybe not recapture it, exactly, because it already exists fully captured in his memory.
Reproduce it in a physical state--that's what he means.
For decades he seldom if ever thought of that tinfoil tree or those transforming colors or that creaking Christmas carol played out on that laboring wheel.
But now, all of a sudden, he can hardly get any of that out of his mind.
Today's tree is lovely, fine to gaze upon, elegant, hardly tacky, mesmerizing in its own way. But it stays one color. And it hasn't any sound. It offers no music.
The man wonders if, next year, he couldn't enjoy the extravagance of two trees of the season--this one-toned silent one of the modern day, and, across the room, a tacky and treasured tinfoil and hypnotic one, changing colors in a slow, flawless waltz to the steady time of that creaking wheel.
It turns out the boy was not alone and that the man isn't either.
A six-foot aluminum Christmas tree with a color wheel, either original or a reproduction, is a collector's item now, a high-dollar value. The storekeeper on Main Street in North Little Rock said he had one last year and sold it for $600.
A few blocks north, in the old fire station, the North Little Rock History Commission offers this season a "Baby Boomer Christmas" exhibit. And there, in the corner, is a tinfoil tree with a color wheel, loaned by someone who has no intention of letting go of it.
Actually, that tree doesn't seem nearly as expansive as the one of the man's youth.
It could be that memory has enlarged the tree of the '60s. But, tragically, that tree is gone. Only the memory lives.
So it is the memory that matters. So it is the memory that is real.
Anyway, the color wheel on the tree at the exhibit turns easily in a disconcerting silence.
So on Christmas Day of 2014, the man counts his many blessings--one of which is that he now has 11 months or so to shop around for the best deal on a 6-foot tinfoil Christmas tree and to lay his hands on a color wheel that, by insisting on making itself heard, will carol for him, and for him alone, for every second of the next magical season.
May your Christmas Day, this one and those ahead, also be filled with the treasure of music that plays only for you.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/25/2014