Twelfth night is here, the traditional close to the Christmas season, and an appropriate time to reflect on the holidays. Most people probably got that done sometime around New Year’s, but I was tired and rather hungover and pretty focused on football that whole week, so I’m just now getting around to it. For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t travel; Laura’s family came to Silver Spring to attend her commencement and stayed on through Christmas morning. It was a big change for everyone, and as hostesses, Laura and I were feeling quite grown-up, if anxious. The occasion seemed to call for another first: our first Christmas tree.
It may seem like the whole world falls into a sentimental swoon the minute trussed-up pines appear in church lots, or are assembled in the back aisles of Target. Strap one to the mini-van, pull the color-coded branches from the box! But for some people, the tree as symbol is fraught with mixed emotions. It’s always so much more than a tree – it’s the past, hung from limbs, item by item: the painted plaster star from kindergarten, the Nutcracker commemorating the grammar-school play, the souvenir from your first trip to the city you’re now living in, the angel from the year you needed prayers, and a friend, and she sent you both. Not all memories are sugar plums. Say you grew up non-Christian and the young evangelicals with whom you spent your schooldays told you constantly that you were a super kid, but most certainly hellbound, their self-righteousness reaching fever-pitch around the holidays. Maybe picking a tree was not a magical day with dad and a saw in a snowy forest, but a drunken, violent fiasco, the crooked fir a perfect emblem of bitter resignation. (In defense of my family and Laura’s, I want to clarify that everything above is entirely hypothetical and not a reference to our own upbringings.) I’m just saying, there are reasons the rare American may not feel compelled to install a Christmas tree in his or her home, and Laura has had a few of her own over the years. Me, I just decorate the houseplants.
And why get a tree if you’re not going to be around to tend and enjoy it? The past two years, I’ve been in Boston, and either Michigan or Minnesota before that. A dry pine in an empty apartment? Downright dangerous. But this year, company was coming. We had to think of others and their expectations, as called for not just by the season but by hostessing decorum. Why, it seemed like it would be rude not to have a tree. What are we, heathens? (And were heathens not the original tree-keepers, anyway?) It’s just what’s done. You go into someone’s home in December, you compliment them on their tree. “It’s a beautiful tree,” you say, and then add a detail, like “So full!” or “Great color scheme!” or “It looks so real!” or “Disco-tree, huh? That’s different!”
So one Saturday morning, we exiled the houseplants to the bedroom to clear a space, and we put on our hats and gloves and set out on our great expedition to – to the farmer’s market, about a block away. We didn’t want one of Whole Foods’ uniform, bourgeois trees, and there’s a Boy Scouts lot, but I don’t want to give money to anyone who discriminates against gay kids. Laura didn’t take seriously my plan to drive to a State Forest, cut down what looked good and stash it under a tarp in the trunk. (Anchor vs. sails.) So we did the practical thing and went with some farmers from Pennsylvania who’d been driving down for the market since Thanksgiving. (Didn’t ask them about their politics.) We walked over thinking we’d get a small tree for our small living room, maybe 3’ tall. Then again, there was vertical space to spare, so maybe 5’ tall, I proposed, measuring myself against a demo. Nothing that size had yet been unloaded, so the farmer went deeper into the truck bed and pulled out a fine smallish spruce, just a touch over 6’ tall. Laura paid the $40 – I insisted that she pay so that it would never somehow become my “goddamned tree” – and we walked it home on our shoulders, stepping on our long shadows.
It fit perfectly in front of our window. Fixed in the stand, it began to open up. It had a wild look, untrimmed, not wholly symmetrical but balanced anyway. We figured out how many strands of lights we’d need and strung them around it, then got out the ornaments. I have a box of ornaments collected from childhood, but Laura doesn’t, so I gave her a few I’d bought in advance of this big day – some Stars of David, Maryland Terps balls and a shiny mug of beer. I hung the Michigan 1998 Rose Bowl ball prominently, the Maid o’ Milkin’, and one or two that I’d made with my mom when I was a kid. It wasn’t bad for first timers. No, it was lovely, quite natural looking, not too gaudy, just right. I thought, “You could pick that tree out of a lineup as our own.”
But my favorite thing about the tree was how clearly Hester admired it. She loves a project, so she supervised its set-up and then promptly settled beneath it, a contented loaf. Most people say cats are hell on trees, but she didn’t mess with it, just took up residence under its boughs where she’d gaze up at the lights with that Zen-like expression cats usually only get after a good meal. Day or night, we could find her under her tree. I liked getting up in the dark of morning, plugging in the lights, and sitting with my coffee just looking at the tree and at Hester looking at the tree, imagining she was tuned in to some ancient instinct and felt protected in its umbrage.
Yet, as Christmas grew nearer, the tree changed little by little, and I’d grown so acquainted with it that I could perceive its slight droop. More needles peppered the carpet. In its first days, it had drunk a quart daily; now it wasn’t taking up any water. I got depressed when I looked at it then, this beautiful being that had lived in the ground and the sun, dying right in front of me. Dying for my amusement, for the sake of tradition. (Don’t get me wrong – I love tradition, but not typically more than I love trees.) I felt guilty in the way you feel guilty when you’re conversing with cows and you remember your last hamburger. But the hamburger was already dead when you ordered it, as the tree was already cut.
Just before Laura’s family arrived, we arranged our gifts for them under the tree, shiny paper reflecting colored lights. They added to pile when they came over, and they said it was a very nice tree. “Thanks for getting the tree,” her dad said. Then we took her parents to Annapolis where we finally found the perfect tree topper, a Maryland Blue Crab in a tangle of Christmas lights. Across the room, we lit the menorah for Hannukah, too. And on Christmas morning, Laura and I donned Santa hats, reached under the boughs and handed gifts around the room.
I look around the same room now, symbols, symbols everywhere –what’s a photograph worth? Why do I keep a small jar of shells from a beach on Platte Lake twenty years ago? What’s the value of a teacup, a thumb-worn book? We come into adulthood with our values externally imposed; we are made of our experiences and coerced by our society. But the older I get, the more I feel liberated by the responsibility of making my own meaning out of the mix, choosing what to keep, discard and create. A Christmas tree is Pagan, Christian, European, American; it’s the past; it comes too early; it’s commodity; it’s the beautiful human need to see life in the dead of winter; it’s ironically killed to serve that need; it smells good and makes the cat happy. I’m an adult now – hell, I’ve hosted Christmas – I get to decide what my Christmas tree means among all possible and fixed meanings.
A winter weekend with my love. A farmer’s care, but not too much of it. Light when light is sparse. Thinking of someone else for a change. Family—the one you were born with and the one you’ve put together. When I look back on 2011, as every year, the times that matter most are those I spent with family, including that wider family comprised of good friends. I’m not saying that the Christmas tree is the perfect pathetic fallacy for all that love spread over all that land – just that I choose to see it as another reminder that we all live and we all die, as another opportunity to think about what we do, why we do it, and who we do it for.
I couldn’t bear to just throw it on the curb. I wanted to take it to a State Forest or something, and light it ablaze with great ceremony. Laura felt this was impractical, if not illegal. I say that if you can’t burn your own Christmas tree, then freedom is nothing but a gas station somewhere in the upper Midwest. So we compromised and drove it to Rock Creek Park around sunset, cut it up and stuffed in in one of their stone fireplaces. We lit its boughs, fanned the orange flames until its thick smoke slowed evening traffic, and raised a couple of mugs of Mad Fox Festivus beer to what a good tree it had been.
So let the drummers drum, then. Let the new year begin to unfurl. It’s still winter, but never for long. Time to work so that I can play; time to miss the ones I love who are far away so that I can anticipate the sweetness of reunion; time to remember the ones who have gone, and to go on living in my turn, with them a part of me. (Made my grandpa’s gingerbread on Christmas morning. My mom, on the phone, said, “Thank you for eating my dad’s bread!”) We might get a tree next year, and we might not. But we’ve got all these ornaments now. I’m thinking a potted tree, one to last through spring so we can plant it later, maybe in some State Forest, a fair deal bought from earnest farmers with good politics… Laura says we’ll just have to wait and see.
