English professor Joseph Geha’s first memories of the holidays were through the eyes of a young boy who had recently immigrated with his family from Lebanon.

“When we first came to America from Lebanon my parents knew we needed a tree because it was Christmas time, and that’s just what you do, but they had no idea of how to make it stand up,” he said.

“One of my earliest memories about Christmas was of my mother trying to hold the tree up with yarn and nailing the yarn to the wall. My father was no help, he didn’t know how to make the tree stay up either,” Geha said. “Of course the tree fell, broke all the ornaments and knocked baby Jesus out of the manger. I remember thinking our tree was really sad looking.”

Wayne Rowley came to ISU in the dead of winter, 1968, and experienced Iowa weather at its worst.

“My family and I were supposed to come to Iowa State from Utah by plane, but because of the weather, we couldn’t get a flight into the state, so we took a train instead. The train from Utah to Ottumwa took about 24 hours and we were told that we would be able to catch a bus from Ottumwa to Ames,” he said.

“When we got off the train in Ottumwa it was about 20 below zero, and no one else got off or on the train. We went into the train station and it was empty, there wasn’t a soul in there. We wandered around the station for a while looking for someone to help us, but no one was there because it was Jan. 1,” Rowley said.

“Finally we found some stranger on the street, and they told us there wasn’t any bus from Ottumwa to anywhere. Then we had the bright idea to call Hertz Rent-A-Car. The man who finally showed up to take us to the airport didn’t look too happy, and I suspect he was nursing a hangover from the night before.

“He had six cars at the airport and the first five wouldn’t start. That was our introduction to Iowa. There is nothing as cold as Iowa. It didn’t warm up for about two weeks and I was ready to turn my resignation in and get the hell back to where we came from,” Rowley said.

The holidays are notorious for presents that you don’t know quite what to do with, but for Patricia Miller, coordinator of the lecture program, sometimes the presents in her family leave people … speechless.

“I remember one year, my older sister came back from her first year at college, and she had created Christmas gifts for everyone. She was quite the artist, but I think she was in her dark and moody period as an artist.

“My mother unwrapped her present, which was a large painting of a young woman hugging the feet of Jesus on the crucifix. The blood from His feet was dripping down over her arms. The look on my mother’s face was torn between looking proud of her daughter’s artistic talents, and appalled at this bloody image,” Miller said.

“The painting was stored lovingly in a closet and visited periodically by members of the family,” she said.

You can’t have Christmas without the tree, but sometimes the logistics of getting the right sized tree can be complicated.

Prem Paul, associate dean of veterinary medicine, was going on his second year in the United States, and wanted to do Christmas the right way — which meant having a Christmas tree.

“When I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota I wanted to have a Christmas tree very badly because I was going out with a Christian girl and I wanted to be just like everyone else. Well, I had a friend who had a house on an acreage with a tree farm, and she told me I could come out and cut down a tree for free, which was desirable because I was a poor student.

“She had some other people out to her farm to cut down trees that day also, and by the time I got to the farm, there were no little trees left. So, I ended up cutting down only about half a tree because it was so big, and then we tied it onto the top of my old Chevy Impala and drove back into town,” he said.

“I lived on the second floor in a very small one room efficiency apartment, and when I tried to get the tree through he door, it wouldn’t fit. We had to take it around back and devise a pulley system up the fire escape to get it into the building. The tree was so big that I couldn’t open up the sofa bed that I slept on, and I had to sleep on the floor.”

Paul’s wife, Missi Paul, who remembers more of the gory details of the gigantic tree, described it as about 12 feet in diameter and nine feet tall.

“The tree smelled so much that it smelled like a pine forest in there, and Prem didn’t have any decorations, except for a football he put in it.”

“When he had his Christmas party, the tree was so big that there was only room for three people in the room and everyone else had to stand in the hall,” she said.