The Truth of the CD Christmas Tree

Well, this week, the Holiday Season finally arrives. And once again, as I have for virtually every year that Barb and I have owned our Sister Bay home; the time has come to put out our CD Christmas tree.

For many years, the Village of Sister Bay was gracious enough to provide a real tree for my front lawn (complete with a set of lights), but when the Village chose to regulate the distribution of the trees to businesses I was forced to find other options. Thus, with a limited budget for such things, I resorted to a spiral tree decoration in order to continue the tradition.

The question I am most often asked about my CD Christmas Tree is, “Where do you get all those CDs?” There are two answers to this question: one answer is the truth; the other answer is not the truth, but would be the truth if I were independently wealthy. The untruth goes something like this:

With fond memories of the famous Comiskey Stadium celebration in the late 1970s when a throng of true music fans gathered to witness the burning of thousands upon thousands of Disco albums, I am appalled to see, in this new century, disco returning to the airwaves and on the shelves of music stores. Fed up with the failure to thoroughly eradicate this music-less travesty, I have taken it upon myself to form a coalition to gather – by any means available – all the disco CDs possible. Rather than burn or otherwise destroy these digital disasters, however, my coalition utilizes them as Christmas ornaments allowing them to serve at least some small purpose while simultaneously reminding everyone that Disco Sucks! Thus, my annual tree is courtesy of Donna Summers, the Commodores, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, and all the other jerks that ruined every high school dance and forced me into a highly successful role as a juvenile delinquent.

So much for my fantasy CD Christmas Tree. The real answer to the identity of all those CDs is this: the bookstore computerized in January of 1996 and a few months later we began a subscription to a version of books-in-print on CDs. New CDs arrived monthly, and updates arrived weekly, but once installed, or as new CDs arrived, the previous month’s CDs became obsolete. Before too long, I had quite a collection of useless CDs. Normal people would probably just have tossed the old ones away, but somehow, I kept thinking that if I just thought long enough, and hard enough, some use for this “trash” would come to mind. So I brought them home. I stacked them on shelves, on my workbench, on the basement stairs, etc. Soon I was salvaging AOL, CompuServe, Juno, and EarthLink discs from my mail. And, as people learned that I was collecting CD’s, I soon became the repository for everyone else’s junk CD’s.

Soon my CD cupboards runneth over and my wife did sayeth unto me, “What the hell are you going to do with all these stupid discs.”

Just when I was about to relent, when, in a moment of weakness I was prepared to succumb and banish my discs to the trash, the Village of Sister Bay did place a Christmas tree in my front yard. And so I did string an extension cord to the tree and pluggethed it in. And as I did gazeth upon the tiny lights on the gentle green boughs I thought, “Whoa, this is just what I’ve been waiting for!”

And so with drill and twist ties I prepared the discs and, the next morning, I set forth into my front lawn to hang the discs. And my hands did freeze. And my lips did chap. And my wife thought me a kook. But that first night, some odd years ago, when I did pluggeth in the tree, adorned with my salvaged CD trash, the tree did seem to glow from within and the wife did smile and my children did exclaim, “Cool.”

And thusly, was the CD Christmas Tree created. It has even become somewhat of a Holiday tradition in my household. My daughter looks forward to seeing it when I pick her up at Christmas break and bring her home, straining to catch sight of it as we round the bend at the Old Anderson House Museum; and on the years that she is here for Thanksgiving we wait so she can join in the hanging of the CDs. So maybe my obsessive compulsive collecting of what should be trash has served a purpose. Then again, maybe I’m just some sicko with a perversion for silver discs. I’ll leave that for you to decide.