December 2018 - James Trumm

A Snowless Christmas and a Weed Tree

I call wherever I’m living “home” no matter where it is. But when I think of home at Christmastime, I think only of Toledo, Ohio. It’s where I spent my first 21 Christmases and, years later, where I spent 15 Christmases with my sons. Those memories are among my happiest. What is home if not a place in the mind to return to?

This year, Toledo was home to a spontaneous demonstration of the authentic, noncommercial holiday spirit. It erupted by a drugstore in a nondescript desert of concrete at the intersection of Art and Whimsy.

It began with a weed, a homely stalk that had stubbornly pushed its way up through a crack in a tiny pedestrian island at the corner of Alexis and Secor. The weed wasn’t very tall or especially beautiful. But 20-year old Alyssa Emrick saw it and was moved to show it some love. She hung a few ornaments on it and left, little knowing that what she’d done was about to inspire the whole city.

Others saw what Alyssa had done and were moved to add their own decorations. They contributed stuffed animals, baseballs, handbills, representations of Jesus, peace signs, cans of soda, American flags, beads, straw, marbles, buttons, dolls, tinsel, business cards, stars, lace, fuzzy dice, crosses, and playing cards.

When the decorations became so numerous that they obscured the little tree, people began to decorate the nearby light pole.

Someone put up a traditional Christmas tree in on a strip of grass in front of the drugstore. Local charities encouraged people to bring presents for the needy and place them around the tree. A pit bull rescue group collected food and toys for homeless dogs and cats. Choral groups came and sang Christmas carols while the traffic whizzed by.

Toledoans felt connected to this real-life realization of Charles Shultz’s parable about the meaning of Christmas. Maybe this is because Toledo itself is a little like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree: a bit homely, frequently passed over, but still loved. We can identify with that.

The growing folk art display attracted attention, first by the local media and then nationally. Soon the Toledo Weed Tree had its own Facebook page that now has over 13,000 followers. It became, improbably, a place of pride for a city that is often better known — if it is known at all — as an unfortunate example of the deindustrialization of the American midwest.

On Christmas eve, I made a pilgrimage to the Toledo weed tree along with Lori Seubert and Spencer Trumm. We dropped off our donations. We talked with strangers. A local bicycle sharing organization gave us cups of hot cocoa and a pizzeria offered everyone free slices. Lori sang some Christmas carols. We talked to a man who’d taken it upon himself to tend the weed tree every day and to wrap presents that people brought for needy families. At that moment, that urban intersection felt, improbably, like home.

There was no snow at Christmas in Toledo. I was disappointed. Having spent most of my life in the northern clines of northwest Ohio, Massachusetts, and Maine, I associate the winter holidays with landscapes blanketed in white. But seeing the Christmas Weed Tree put me into the spirit of the season nonetheless.

Christmastime at Greenfield Village

On December 23, 2018, Lori and I drove from Toledo to Dearborn, Michigan for a wintery evening of Christmas cheer. Our destination was Greenfield Village, a part of The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, a sprawling institution that includes museums and historical buildings.

It was a special night: two days before Christmas and the village was suitably decorated for the holidays. Actors, musicians, and storytellers, all in vintage American attire, strolled the grounds entertaining the visitors.

Greenfield Village is a large collection of historical American buildings that emphasize industry and innovation. The building housing Thomas Edison’s laboratory is there. So is the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop. There are vintage machine shops and mills, all in running condition. All of these buildings were purchased by Henry Ford and transported to the 80-acre site in Dearborn. There are antique steam locomotives and Model T Fords.

I took a lot of photos in the machine shop. It’s a place where form follows function.

It was hard not to be impressed by Henry Ford’s vision, his historical imagination, and the huge financial commitment he made to preserving artifacts of American history. He thought that factories, labs, and humble shops where inventors tinkered were a vital part of America and were worth preserving. And he was right.

Still, it was hard for me to keep Ford’s legacy of racism and antisemitism completely out of my mind. This article from the Washington Post lays it out:

In 1919, Ford purchased The Dearborn Independent, then an obscure newspaper published in the Michigan city that was the headquarters of his automobile company. For the next eight years, the weekly publication reflected his bigoted views.
One of the paper’s chief targets was the so-called “International Jew,” a sinister figure cited as the root cause of World War I. In 1921, The Independent printed the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” even though the book had by then been exposed as a forgery created by the Russian czar’s secret police in 1905 to foment virulent anti-Semitism.
The fraudulent document described an alleged secret cabal of Jewish leaders who plotted to control the world. Nevertheless, the Independent published the discredited document, giving it both wide distribution and global credibility. Ford’s newspaper merged racism with anti-Semitism by calling Prohibition-era whiskey “n_-r gin” and labeling jazz “Yiddish moron music.”
Ford and his publication attracted attention throughout the world, including from Adolf Hitler. In fact, Ford is the only American mentioned by name in Hitler’s notorious “Mein Kampf,” published in 1925. Anti-Semitic Independent articles translated into German and other languages during the 1920s were used to “prove” Nazis were not alone in their pathological hatred of Jews and Judaism.

The ethical quandary I was in mirrors the debate we have today about how to view historical figures — and present-day artists and politicians — who have contributed much to our culture but whose behavior seems abhorrent by today’s standards. Feeling some discomfort around these issues is the sign of a healthy mind. Those who freely grant impunity to bad actors because they also did great things are just as single-minded as those who attempt to reduce artists to monsters and politicians to perverts.

Having warmed up in the cozy sawdust-and-oil smelling machine shop. Lori and I walked over the the village’s mail street. There were a lot of Christmas festivities going on there. This fellow is a mummer and he was having a fine time walking around saying rude things to people.

Lori got the idea of taking home a Christmas tree in one of these Model A trucks. It didn’t quite work out, though we did score some nice wreaths on the cheap. It was the last night of operations before the holiday; everything must go.