Things you didn't comprehend as a child because of autism?

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Both. After all, you have trim on a car.

Its not uncommon to do a little shaping on a christmas tree. I usually lop the lowest branches to make it easier to water.

As a child, I found that clowns were a frightening species. That they took on the appearance of a parody of human form was the most ghoulish thing about them. I could not imagine where they lived when not being paraded or shown in circuses, or how they managed to survive in a human world.

That was up to about age 7, when I finally understood that it was people wearing makeup.

I think the clown noises and manic behaviour probably had some part in the illusion.

I took a few years to get over my fear. These days i'd have to say that some of my best friends are clowns.

Around the age of 3 and a half I learned to count to 100 and became extremely fascinated with large numbers. Yet because I was so young I didn't really understand the abstract idea of numbers yet. Most kids that age don't really have a clue about numbers greater than 12 or so.

When I first pondered the idea of very large numbers I asked my mom what the highest number anyone had ever counted to was. I thought there had to be a record and that all the numbers beyond the record were not known, i.e. "one million" wasn't known until someone somewhere had literally counted from one to one million. It didn't make sense to me that they could go on forever.

I also thought that people had discovered the names of numbers magically through counting, i.e. "one million" always existed but you figured out the name by counting to it. I didn't understand the difference between the actual abstract numbers and the symbols/names given to them by people. I thought the symbols/names existed completely independent of people.

My curiosity about the world was way ahead of my ability for abstract thought so I had all kinds of weird notions about things that most other kids that age would never even think to think about.

As a kid, I had no concept of teenagers. Despite having aunts and uncles ranging from 30 to only 6 years older than me(and half of them in their teens), in my world, there were kids and there were adults.

This and the post below it, apparently, are correct. But when people say "trim the tree" in reference to Christmas trees, they mean they're decorating it, as in "adding trim", in the same way as carpentry trimwork or automotive trimwork. I guess the ornaments are the "trim".

I didn't comprehend how to ride a bike.

I could not seem to manage the motor-coordination and balance involved in successfully operating a bicycle for more than a few feet. After a about a dozen times of falling off and injuring myself, I gave up for good, and haven't really ridden one since. Not only other kids, but even my own family ridiculed me for this. As you can imagine, this was yet another impairment to childhood socialization.

wow... I really forgot about all this until just now.