Rumors had sifted through the family for days before Christmas Day arrived on a Friday in 1959. Something new was afoot at my grandfather’s house in Harmony where my mother’s people had gathered to celebrate each Christmas for all 14 years of my life.

It had snowed 10 inches several days before. The roads from Bingham through Brighton and Wellington to Harmony were icy. But as my father drove, we sang Christmas songs and had no worries, even though the heater in the old Ford didn’t work very well and the rear windows were covered with frost.

As usual, our family of five arrived in the forenoon, entering the house through what my grandmother referred to as “the lunchroom,” a small restaurant also known as The Wagon Wheel, attached to the main house.

The rest of the family had arrived already. The boy cousins were trying to outdo one another at the pinball machine that took up the space along one wall beside the jukebox that emitted the sound of Brenda Lee singing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”

Several of the uncles were sitting at a table in the back playing cribbage with my grandfather, and several more were in the lunchroom kitchen helping my grandmother baste the turkey and peel potatoes and squash.

The four aunts, wearing holiday-theme aprons, were in constant motion carrying pies, plates of cookies, bowls of popcorn balls, boxes of fudge and Jell-O salads to the lunchroom. They placed this bounty on the gleaming top of the glass showcase in which my grandmother’s pies were displayed when the lunchroom was open for business.

My grandfather, taking a break from card playing, reached into the watery depths of the Coca-Cola cooler for bottles of Orange Crush and Hires root beer, popped the caps off in the opener built into the cooler’s side, and handed the bottles around to all 11 of his grandchildren.

As far as I could tell, nothing new was afoot in the lunchroom. It looked like it always did at Christmastime with red and silver tinsel garlands and round glass tree ornaments strung about – even on the horns of the deer head mounted on the wall – and all that aunt- and mother-made food positioned attractively on special-for-the-occasion plates.

As usual, meaty, sweet and tangy odors drifted from the narrow confines of the lunchroom kitchen, and, as usual, rills of laughter and animated talk filled the lunchroom.

It was when I found my way into the house proper and entered the living room that I discovered what was new. I stopped in my tracks in utter shock. Instead of the usual balsam fir Christmas tree, cut by an uncle at the “home place” up on Sugar Hill, there stood a silver aluminum tree complete with a revolving color wheel causing the creation to turn yellow, red, green and blue in turn. The ends of the tree limbs were adorned with blue glass balls.

It was, after all, 1959, the modern era. People preferred to live in ranch-style houses furnished with gray or yellow Formica, chrome, and plastic tables and chairs. They painted kitchen walls strange shades of turquoise and preserved food in Tupperware plastic containers. Sputnik had been launched two years before and other satellites now orbited the Earth. Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower was president and we all had heard about the Cold War. Why not have a Christmas tree that resembled a shiny, metallic robot?

I disliked that tree the moment I saw it. Gone were the delicate and beautiful bubble-light glass candles casting a yellow glow into branches of fir. Gone were the fragile glass ornaments in fanciful gold, silver, green and red shapes. And gone was the lighted star that capped the tree in all its glory.

My grandmother, on the other hand, adored the aluminum tree. No more needles shedding all over the rug. No sticky pitch mucking up fingers while the tree was being set up. No more fabricating from pieces of scrap wood a tree stand that couldn’t always be depended on to keep the tree upright. Perhaps the tree appealed to some young and gleaming part of my grandmother’s spirit needing a forward-looking, tinny kind of beauty.

But at that time, I had no clue that our family was on the cutting edge of Christmas tree technology.

First developed by the Aluminum Specialty Co., the aluminum tree was billed in a booklet issued by the Aluminum Company of America as nontarnishing, strikingly beautiful and long-lasting. To enhance its beauty, its legs, which to my eyes resembled those of a music stand, could be covered with Alcoa aluminum foil, the booklet advised.

Clearly, my grandmother had embraced the future. I, on the other hand, at age 14 – as old as the atomic bomb – was the very embodiment of the future. But I wanted no part of the modern age if it meant a Christmas tree made of aluminum.

As jarring as the metal tree was to my sensibilities, it did not stop any of us from doing what we always did on Christmas Day. We sang carols, we opened presents, we gorged on homemade food and nibbled on ribbon candy, Whitman’s Sampler chocolates and peanut brittle even after we were so full we were sure we couldn’t hold another bite.

The icy aluminum branches of the artificial tree may have signaled the advent of a new era in modern history, but it had no power to outshine the deeply rooted traditions of home, hearth and family that bound us to one another.

ahamlin@bangordailynews.net

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