A minor "Star Trek" Christmas miracle

Anyone who knows me (or has read this blog since it started) knows that I am a passionate "Star Trek" fan. My wife is not, though recently she agreed to watch with me two of my favorite episodes of the original series, "Devil in the Dark" and "City on the Edge of Forever". Her verdict? She didn't care for the costuming, and some of the acting seemed dated, but she thought the plots and writing were strong.

But even though Jeannine is not, and in all likelihood, never will be, a big "Star Trek" fan, she knows what it means to me. And last Christmas, when I thought I had lost my treasured gold-plated U.S.S. Enterprise pendant, which had hung on our Christmas trees for many years, she felt my pain.

You see, my habit for the last few years, when it is time to get the Christmas tree out of the house, is to first use long-handled pruning shears to lop off the branches. This makes the thing easier to move through the house and out the doors without brushing against furniture and walls and dropping lots of its dried pine needles all over the floor. (It also has the added benefit of giving me a naked Christmas tree trunk, with which to craft something cool -- like a walking stick or something. I have yet to actually DO this, but as of this writing I have four such trunks in the garage from the last four Christmases, just waiting for the right amount of inspiration and perspiration.)

Sometime during the process of clipping off last year's Christmas tree's branches, the Enterprise pendant was apparently lost. When we put all the ornaments away, it was nowhere to be seen. With a sinking feeling, I realized that it had likely been left, unnoticed, on one of those branches I'd cut off and thrown out. I was bummed out.

That Enterprise pendant is something that I have had with me since high school. It's my understanding that when the original "Star Trek" series was cancelled, Gene Roddenberry formed a company called "Lincoln Enterprises" to try to make a little money off the dead show and also to keep the fans of "Star Trek" happy. One of the items I bought through this mail-order outfit was this little (about three inches long) gold-plated U.S.S. Enterprise pendant. I don't think I ever wore it as a pendant, but it made a wonderful Christmas tree ornament.

So it was very disappointing, to say the least, to think that this nifty little bit of my personal "Star Trek" history had vanished forever. Jeannine tried to keep my hopes up, saying that maybe it had been left in another box of ornaments, and we'd come upon it at some point in time. Well, maybe… but I didn't really think it would.

Fast-forward to yesterday. We were finally decorating the tree, and in the process decided to winnow down our collection of ornaments. There were quite a few which were falling apart, or just plain ugly, or both, and others which were fine and whole but just held no great appeal. So we trashed the first group and set aside the second to give away. And at some point in this process of going through the ornaments…

… Jeannine found it!

The Enterprise pendant had, somehow, come to rest underneath one shallow box which had been set, fairly snugly, into a larger box, and had thus remained out of sight. But Jeannine was keeping an eye out for possible hiding places for the starship, and this one seemed likely, so she pulled the shallow box up, and -- voila!

As you might imagine, I was pretty happy. Yes, I know it's a small thing, and not really a "Christmas miracle" (a wildly overused cliche these days, in my humble opinion)… but sometimes all you need is one of these small occurrences to brighten up the day. Thanks again, Jeannine! -- PL