I should have just kept last year’s tree.
If you took a ruler to this one, measured its height, its width, its weight, I’m sure I’m off by no more than an inch or two, an ounce or so.
I know what I like. I cut right to the chase. It’s a scene from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: I go right up to the first one that catches my eye, put my arms around it, give it a hug, lift it off the ground, (measuring, approximating, inhaling the aroma), and if it feels right I take it home with me.
And after all the lights and 30 years worth of ornaments have been applied, damn if it doesn’t look just like last year’s tree!
I’m not complaining, but it’s eerie. It’s like there is some kind of relationship, some kind of connection, some inner design I am working to. Has there been building in the cave of my brain all year – ever since we took the last one down, another perfect, platonic Christmas tree?
I don’t give it any thought, but I know it when I put my arms around it.
Of course, the tree has got to fit into a particular space, in a room with a specific ceiling height, allow just enough room for, at most, eight people who’ll sit around it on Christmas morning.
How does that tree feel, among all the other trees? Like the ugly girl, the awkward boy, sitting on folding chairs at the edge of the dance floor hoping for an invitation?
Or is it like Vertigo, to cite another favorite film of mine, when Jimmy Stewart dresses up Kim Novak to look like the woman he loved and lost, only it turns out he’s dressing Kim to look like Kim. The joke’s on him.
Clearly, the intent is to make this year’s tree look like last year’s tree, and the one before, and the one before that. We have an idea, and everything we do is calculated to achieve that effect.
I guess I should feel a bit more empathy for the tree. We make a big show of the selection but, ironically, we don’t respect its individuality. Then again, is it really another, different tree? Is it the ghost of Christmas trees past? And what of the rejects cast to the side, too large or too small, too thick or too dry?
This, at least, is a better fate than theirs. This one, at least, was not cut from the soil and strapped to a truck and driven 500 miles for naught.
Look at it now, standing there in the corner, all dressed up in tiny lights and handmade ornaments. It knows the truth, but it is content to allow us our illusion.
If you’re not careful you can lose control, be sucked back a dozen years or more, forever trapped in a Christmas or Christmases past.
If I look carefully, I can tell the year, or come darn close. But usually you don’t look too closely at a Christmas tree. Usually, when the tree is done, you allow your eyes to go out of focus, allow your mind to drift.
But there, that ornament of a hockey player made from dough, I could swear we got that in1992, when Bobby was on his first traveling team. That February the parents and players went to Canada by bus. That was the first of several successive school vacations spent, for the most part, in a hockey rink.
And there, those faded blue and green balls, with the gold tracery, those were Mary’s parents’ ornaments, on their tree, and the year is 1949.
The shuttle craft? Press the top and Spock says “Live long and prosper”. That’s only, what, 20 years old or so? It’s amazing that it has lasted, and prospered, for so long.
Now I remember: We haven’t always had our tree in the same spot in the house. It used to be in front of the slider, before the desk went in there. Once it was in the other corner of this room, and there’s the hole from the screw we put in the wall – where we ran a wire to the trunk of the tree, to keep it from falling over again.
I guess there have been a few mistakes made, a few trees that were too tall, or too wide, or whose trunks were too thick to fit into the stand. But even if we choose poorly, we can always add an extra layer of ornaments, or turn the tree so that its bad side is facing the wall, or squint our eyes a little more tightly, fracture the light, bend the shadow, give ourselves up to the overwhelming urge to forget.
Right now, staring at this tree, I’m having a hard time remembering any bad sides, any bad decisions, any bad Christmases.
It seems that somehow, whatever is going on in the world or in our lives, we manage to make it to that place where by unanimous consent, everything’s just fine the way it is.
Maybe it is an illusion. Maybe underneath the lights and the bulbs is an ugly, twisted, corpse of a tree.
But maybe just this once, at this time of year, we just have to blink our eyes a few times and let it be.
