One of my favorite pictures of my father, Fred Dezotell, was a black and white photo of him standing on a tall ladder decorating a 20-foot-tall Christmas tree.  

My dad would put up a huge tree every year in the grand ballroom of the Student Union at The University of North Dakota. Dad was the maintenance supervisor for the Student Union and decorating that tree was a job he looked forward to every year.  

Dad loved Christmas. Not only did he look forward to decorating that ballroom at UND, but he loved to decorate the outside and the inside of our house for his favorite holiday too.  

Back in the days when I was growing up the strands of lights people used to decorate with were multicolored, and the bulbs were quite a bit bigger than the little white lights most people use today.  

At night the houses in our neighborhood, and all over Grand Forks, looked like they had been hit with a box of bright Crayola crayons. All those lights would shimmer off the snow in our yards and on our roofs, turning that snow into a sparkling rainbow of color.  

Every year, shortly after Thanksgiving, Dad would load us kids up in the car and we would go shopping for the perfect Christmas tree. He always made sure we had a real fir tree for our house, one that filled up one end of our living room from floor to ceiling. Dad was partial to a Douglas fir. I like to think that he preferred the Douglas fir because his baby boy was named Douglas.  

Dad would make sure there was always just enough room for his favorite decoration to go on top of the tree. That ornate tree-topper was a beautiful gold and silver shimmering angel, with real white feathered wings. Dad’s angel was always packed away safely from year to year, lovingly and tenderly wrapped with tissue paper and placed in its special box.  

Then when it came time to decorate our tree, Dad would bring the angel out from its hiding place. That beautiful angel was the last thing Dad would gently secure on our tree.