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Christmas—Rather a lot happened during the final quarter of my first year in Paris. Hardly any of it made the journal. Some day, I hope, I’ll feel up to describing a Christmas-shopping hike down the Champs-Élysées one evening, with our feet making the first marks in the season’s first snow on the pavement at the Jardins des Tuileries. Or the amazing experience that Elder
C Brooklyn (“Beetle”) Derr and I shared the night Wozzeck opened at the Opéra, with insights into the apparently-innate ability of ordinary Parisians to turn a shop window into a work of art.
Since I have a picture, I will mention that it
fell to me to obtain and decorate the Mission Home Christmas tree,1 with the results that you see here. As far as I recall, nobody really fought me for the honor, but I was particularly gratified to have it, for I cherished some firm notions about proper tree adornment.
Perhaps you can discern, in this rather inadequate available-light photo, that my idea of celestial propriety required that the trunk have several strings of mini-lights, on separate blinking circuits, wound tightly around it. And that icicles (preferably the old-fashioned, now-unavailable heavy-foil variety) be hung individually, by hand, from every branch.
1I probably hold the record for this honorific distinction, inasmuch as it was again accorded to me in 1967 and in 1968. But more about that, when we get there.
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