DECORATING THE TREE
I spent the morning decorating our Christmas tree. It’s been a struggle to arrange a suitable
time for this job, it’s not like you can slap a tree up in an hour or even
two. Well, at least I can’t. I need time.
I need ambience. I need
quiet. I need Christmas music in the
background. It also normally requires a
glass or two of wine but it was Saturday morning so that didn’t quite fit.
Mostly, what I need is the house to myself to putter at my
own pace. All day if possible, with no
interruptions to prepare meals, no one watching some noisy, guns-a-blazing, car
chase, man movie, and no comments from the peanut gallery on how I’m doing it
wrong. This was supposed to happen
yesterday but Mother Nature stepped in and did her own decorating for Christmas
so he stayed home.
My most favorite part of having a Christmas tree is getting
up early and sipping my morning coffee, basking in the multi-colored twinkling
lights on the tree. It’s a quiet,
peaceful, thoughtful time that I treasure and as the days were ticking by without
a tree to admire in the dark I was beginning to feel cheated. Even though my window of opportunity today
was the few hours it was going to take the movie watcher/peanut gallery critic
to clean out the yard and driveway, I knew I had to take it.
The reason I need more than a few hours is because it is so
much more than the physical putting on of lights and ornaments. It is more of a mystical experience, a mix of
memories, an annual revisiting of all that has gone before. Shoot-em-up movies really spoil the mood.
Of course, this tradition is relatively new in my life. Christmas tree decorating has been through
many renditions in my many years.
My first recollection of decorating the tree involves Mom
spending an evening trying to get the bubble lights (remember them?) all
working, and on the tree, before we kids were allowed to do our part of
ornaments and tinsel. Think: exasperated
adult with probably fifteen other things on the go being yammered at by a pack
of over-stimulated, Santa-is-coming-to-town excited kids and you will know the
kind of Peace-On-Earth evening of which I speak.
As unpeaceful this custom is, though, I went on to do the
exact same thing when my kids were little.
Is it some kind of rite of passage?
Some test of our character? Do we
need this dose of unreasonable expectations and near insanity to truly
appreciate the beauty of singing Silent Night?
I know not the answer to this question, but I have just a few ornaments
that remind me of this time and I treasure them and the memories they evoke as
I place them on my modern, pre-lit, artificial tree.
Life goes on though, and Christmas has evolved. There were the years when the kids were so
little they didn’t help but were transfixed by the pretty lights and drawn to
the packages beneath. There were a few
incredibly sad Christmases where we only made it through under the steam of other
people’s engines. I remember those too.
The busy years. The
whole-house-is-full years. The empty
nest years. And now, the aren’t-grandkids-the-best
years. My containers of different
decorations represent all of these times and tie me to loved ones who are no
longer here. I treat them like talismans
– holding them connects me to a different time and place. In this way I welcome them into my house for
Christmas. It’s a little thing, but it
feels good.
A few weeks ago my grand daughter sat me down to teach me
everything she has learned so far in Grade One.
My assignment was to repeat the letters of the alphabet after her but I
mis-behaved and sang the A-B-C song instead.
After being reprimanded I was told to begin again. Being a bad Grandma I sang it a second
time. When I was done she stood there,
hands on her hips, and said “I am going to have to call your mother!” I guess that’s the ultimate threat in her
world but the more I think about it, the more I wish she would have. It would be great to talk to Mom again even
if it meant getting an “E” on my report card.
