‘Tis the season of traditions for Elmwood Park family
By Mary M. Flory for Chronicle Media — November 30, 2015
From 2007, Joe and David Baratta carry a freshly cut tree to the car. (Photo by Lee Baratta)
A thoughtful gift to mark a new family’s first Christmas together now spans three generations and shows no signs of stopping. After all, traditions don’t take a year off.
Some things just get better with age.
Like family traditions: They grow more meaningful with each passing event, becoming as much a part of your family’s story as their reason for being in the first place.
Just ask the Barattas.
This Elmwood Park family of four has been kicking off the Christmas season with an homage to how the parents — Lee and Laura — celebrated the first Christmas they spent married in 1988.
That year, Lee’s father, Tom, cut off the end of Lee and Laura’s Christmas tree, sanded, dated and shellacked it, giving it to them as a present to commemorate their new family’s first Christmas. A tradition spanning three generations was born from that little Charlie Brown-like tree.
Who knew that a dry, sparsely needled Christmas tree could be responsible for a family tradition nearly 30 years in the making?
As the family grew to include Joe in 1992 and David in 1994, the Barattas continued building on Tom’s original idea, trekking up to Richardson Farms in Spring Grove, Ill. — close to the Wisconsin/Illinois border — to select each year’s tree.
“[My grandpa made the ornament] for the first half dozen years or so, then my father took it over,” explained Joe, a 23-year-old in his second year at Chicago’s DePaul University’s College of Law. Then Joe and David took on the responsibility when they were in middle school.
An annual tradition began in 1988, when Lee Baratta’s father, Tom, cut off the end of Lee and Laura’s Christmas tree, sanded, dated and shellacked it, giving it to them as a present to commemorate their new family’s first Christmas
As the boys got older and started college, there wasn’t as much time to drive up to Richardson Farms over Thanksgiving weekend, but the family still gets a fresh tree every year and the tradition lives on.
“It’s just a part of Christmas, of leading up to Christmas. It’s just one of the things you do. Put up the tree, do the lights, make the ornament,” Joe said.
“It’s neat to see how the trees have changed. The first couple are just real small, and they’ve gotten bigger and bigger each year. And you can tell the different varieties we’ve had over the years: long needle, short needle. You can see the difference in the barks.”
“It’s great to see the very first Christmas tree ornament that’s roughly the size of a half dollar,” said David, a Purdue student studying civil engineering, set to graduate in December 2016 from the West Lafayette, Ind., university. “It’s a tree that barely made it all the way through to Christmas and now we get to see a reminder of that every year,” David said.
“This year, our mom got a small pencil tree for all these ornaments,” Joe said. “We’ve got so many ornaments we just don’t know where to put them, so we’ve got a whole tree dedicated to them.”
David likes to think of this collection of ornaments in terms of how many Christmases it means that the family has been lucky enough to have had together.
“There’s the history behind it. It really puts the meaning behind why you are celebrating Christmas,” he said.
Joe has some words of advice for any budding tree ornament makers, though: “Don’t cut too thin. And try to cut straight.”
And, yes, he and David learned the hard way.
— ’’Tis the season of traditions for this Elmwood Park family —
