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My father then took over, swinging the axe. Four or five brisk cuts, and the green-needled spire was horizontal in the snow: A tree from the forest is cut down.

He then squared the base of the trunk so it would be easy to mount when we got it back home: Worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman. My father was deft with the axe-the wood chips from the whittling released the fragrance of resin in the winter air.

When we arrived home, I climbed into the attic and handed down the box of decorations. We had multicolored lights on our tree, and lots of tinsel. Across the street, my best friends had all blue lights, and I felt sorry for them, stuck with a monochrome Christmas.

My father took slats from packing boxes that our sausage and lunch meats were shipped in-there was always a pile of these boxes in the alley behind our butcher shop-and cut them into four 18-inch supports and nailed them to the tree trunk: They fasten it with hammer and nails so that it cannot move.

By now it was late afternoon and dark. Our Douglas fir—it was always a Douglas fir for us, no other evergreen was a Christmas tree—was secure and steady before our living room window, facing the street. We strung the lights, hung the silver and gold ornaments, and draped the tinsel: Men deck it with silver and gold.

When we were done, I ran out onto the gravel road (the paving on Fourth Street West fell short by about 400 yards of reaching our house) and looked at it from the outside, the way passers-by would see it, the framed picture of our Christmas ritual adventure into and out of the woods. I imagined strangers looking at it and wishing they could be inside with us, part of the axe/ Model A pickup/Lake Blaine/tree-choosing/tree-cutting/tree-mounting/tree-decorating liturgy that I loved so much.

And I would look across the street at the tree with blue lights where the Mitchell twins, Alva and Alan, lived—so cold and monotonous. They never went to church, and at times like this it showed. I couldn't help feeling privileged and superior, but also a little sorry for them: Christian pride modified by Christian compassion.

And then, in the winter of 1940, when I was eight years old, we didn't have a tree: For the customs of the peoples are false. It wasn't just the tree that was absent, the richly nuanced ritual was abolished. A noun, "tree," was deleted from December, but along with it an adjective, "Christmas." Or so I felt.

And it was all because Jeremiah had preached his Christmas Tree Sermon. Because Jeremiah had looked through his prophetic telescope, his spirit-magnified vision reaching across 12,000 miles and 2,600 years saw in detailed focus what we did every December, and denounced it as idolatry. And it was because my mother cared far more about Scripture than culture.

I was embarrassed—humiliated was more like it—humiliated as only eight-year-olds can be humiliated. Abased. Mortified. I was terrified of what my friends in the neighborhood would think: They would think we were too poor to have a tree. They would think I was being punished for some unspeakable sin and so deprived of a tree. They would think we didn't care about each other and didn't have any fun in our house. They would feel sorry for us. They would feel superior to us.

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December (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50