12/24/2021
https://nationalroadmagazine.com/nationalroadmagazine-artandlife/christmas-at-the-apple-house/
I can’t remember if I was in second or third grade, but I can distinctly remember losing my mind one Christmas break in the late 1970’s. It had to be either ’77 or ’78 (I’m thinking the latter for some reason), but I recall that, out of all the holiday breaks I enjoyed as a little kid, that was the one that crawled along most slowly. On the days that Mom had off from her job as a bank teller, I would lay under the tree, tucking my head between a couple of wrapped boxes with my name on them, and stare at the lights which coned their way up into the spiderweb of branches that hid the star somewhere up there on the top. Losing myself in the splendor of the color, trying not to think about the fact that I had something like six more days until I could open up whatever rested under all that wrapping paper.
The cheap lights we can get today for a few bucks per box weren’t common back then, and while Mom adeptly covered the living room with garland, advent calendars, and angel chimes, it was always the lights that mesmerized me.
A dozen years later, when I first walked into Terre Haute’s Apple House, my college apartment didn’t quite evoke the Christmas color I’d grown up with. My tree was about two feet tall, my light collection was sparse, and the fake, dark, needles smothered them and reduced them to pinpoint flickers. I was a broke college junior in 1990, so for added decoration I stacked a pyramid of empty Coke cans—sporting various Santa poses on them—in my bedroom window. If I happened upon a couple feet of silver garland, I taped above the threshold to the living room. If someone gifted a Hallmark ornament, I made sure it took center stage amidst the blackness of my tree.
A lot of stores had Christmas displays, as did the mall south of the interstate. And before the Apple House, I had always found myself making an extra trip or two if for no other reason than to soak in the color and enjoy the canned peace that comes from elevator Christmas carols.
But after the Apple House, there was nowhere else to go.
“My dad is the one who started it,” says Tom Cummins, the Apple House’s CEO... [Continue Reading at NRM]
Big thanks to the folks at The Apple House Home and Garden Center for letting us talk to them and sharing their many photos.
