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.