O Christmas tree! Oh Christmas tree! What surprise this season do you have for me?

I recall a holiday time when I was about 9 years old. I was watching TV by the Christmas tree with my sister sitting next to me.

“Lights out!” My father shouted.

“I fixed them last time,” I said to my sister. “It’s your turn now.” Suddenly Mom called her into the kitchen. She stuck her tongue out at me and left the room.

So here I go. I took a new bulb from the box and hunted for the burned out bulb, the one little bugger that made the rest of the set go out. My fingers dove into the balsam tree. Pine needles stung my hands. The string was dark, but not cool yet, so the heat of the bulbs burned my fingers. My arm flinched and knocked a glass ornament off a branch. I heard it shatter when it hit the floor.

“I hope that’s not the one Grandma gave me when I was your age,” yelled my mother from the kitchen. “No. Mom,” I shouted back. “It was the one from Aunt Mary with the hand painted Santa she gave us just before she died.”

“Will you please be more careful!” she screamed. Finally, I replaced the bad bulb and went back to watching TV.

“Lights out!” shouted my father again. My sister stuck her tongue out at me again and danced into the kitchen.

There was the time my older sister stood on a chair to hang an ornament near the top of the tree. She reached too far in and fell off the chair and into the tree. Lights, ornaments, needles and tinsel crashed to the floor. The stand that had just been filled spilled water onto the carpet.

As my sister crawled out from the wreckage, my father, showing no concern for her well-being, shouted expletives in between the words, “I’m not buying another tree. I don’t care if this one broke in half. Put it back up!”

We did. The ornaments kept falling off because the tree was split in the middle and leaned far to the right.

When I had finished college, I lived for a short time with a friend in his apartment. We had just finished decorating a live Douglas fir and sat down to watch a movie when I looked up at the ceiling. Shadows of little legs appeared to be crawling just above where the star had cast its light. More and more crawling shadows appeared on the ceiling.

I stood on a chair for a closer look. Tiny red spiders were running up the Christmas tree trunk. I thought 30, 40, no, maybe a hundred, all about the size of a pin head with quarter-inch legs.

I jumped off the chair. By that time, my friend was staring at the ceiling above the Christmas star. The light had distorted the size of the spiders so now they looked as big as my hand.

“You know what probably happened,” I said to him as more and more “hand-sized” spiders danced along the top of the tree. “There must have been a nest in the tree, and when the lights warmed it up from the cold outside, they all came running out.”

“Did you say ‘nest’?” my nervous friend asked. “That means there’s something else we need to worry about.”

“Yup,” I tried to say calmly. “These little guys are the babies.”

“Where’s the mama?” he shouted.

He lurched off the couch, and before I figured out what he was going to do, he landed a 2-foot jump onto the chair next to the tree and began shooting bug spray through the branches.

I thought we might have died that night from the lingering odor from the bug spray can that lay empty on the floor. The next morning we saw the devastation from the Christmas tree apocalypse. Little dead red spiders were everywhere. Bodies clung to the trunk, the branches, the ornaments, the wires. Below the trunk was a massive scene of` spider corpses that circled all around the stand.

My friend scoured the inside of the tree with his eyes. Then he got on his knees and searched the floor. This time I knew exactly what he was doing.

“Maybe the mama was never in there,” I said. “Maybe she abandoned her children. Too many mouths to feed, you know. I’m sure the father’s gone. Probably a hit-and-run. Or maybe she was gonna bite his head off. Some female spiders do that I think. Anyway, they could have both run out on the kids. Happens a lot nowadays. Maybe the dad is in jail for not paying his spider web tax and maybe …”

“Stop already!” My friend shouted. “Mama’s probably made her new home under the sheets in my bed,” he cried out. “And now that we murdered all her kids, she’s gonna want revenge!”

So we trashed the tree fully dressed with ornaments and lights and bought an artificial for the table the next night. My friend changed his bed sheets. He slept with the light on and a fly swatter next to his pillow for three nights in a row.

We never found the mother or the father or any adult spider hiding anywhere. I thought I saw her in the bathroom tub once, but I told my friend it was a false alarm. The one in the tub was black with a body as big as a nickel.

I had to talk my friend off the ledge when he thought he had a spider bite on his face until the doctor told him it was just a pimple.

I can imagine a movie spoof on the Hallmark Channel called, “Christmas with the Spider Family.”

Now, whenever I look up at a star on top of a live tree, a Christmas song sings in my head.

“It’s beginning to look a lot like spiders, everywhere you go.”

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.