It bears repeating: Melania Trump was not the first Trump wife to be involved in a Christmas controversy. As with so much else, that honour belongs to the I Hit It First of the Donald branch of Fred Trump’s family tree. In her memoir Raising Trump (tagline: “First Lady? Holds no appeal for me personally. First Mother? That could work.”), Ivana Trump reminisced about their Christmases in Aspen which were straight out of Edward Gibbon. The Trumps always stayed at the Little Nell, “a hotel right on the mountain owned by Marvin Davis, an industrialist, movie company owner, and real estate magnate. We had the same three suites every year.”
“Once we’d organized our luggage in the suites and had a snack, we’d head straight out on snowmobiles into the valley to pick out a Christmas tree. We only wanted the top eight feet, so the boys would climb a fifteen-foot tree and saw off that much. It’d flip down to the snow, which was as high as your waist. Then we’d tie the tree to the backs of the snowmobiles and drag it to the hotel. We’d carry it through the lobby and down along the corridor to our master suite, leaving a trail of sappy needles along the way. The hotel staff would take our boxes of ornaments out of hotel storage and put them in the suite when we arrived. Once the tree was in place in the master suite, we’d decorate it. When we left in January, the staff would come in and take down the ornaments, repack and store them, and clean the needles off the carpet and the multitude of strays scattered all over the hotel. They were not too happy with us about that. One year, we arrived in our suites to find a faux Christmas tree already set up in the usual spot and decorated! Attention, Little Nell staffers, message received.”
Raising Trump, Ivana Trump, Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, 2017.
Picture: Colorado, Aspen, silver mines, 1898, United States Library of Congress prints and Photographs division, under the digital ID ppmsca.17857.
The Intermediate Period 