Christmas Trees

We usually have a Christmas Tree Trimming Party. We use the time to get together with friends and neighbors, to try to catch up with them – and get someone else to decorate our Christmas tree.

We aren’t as manipulative as we sound. For several years after our son died we didn’t have a tree, we couldn’t even consider the thought of having a tree. Several years after Daniel's death, Friend Tim, whose parents died when he was in high school, told us we could be grandparents to his two boys, David and Jonathan. They were nine and six at the time, and they gave us a whole new attitude toward life – and toward Christmas. The year we became Grandparents was the first year we had a tree again.

We have accumulated Christmas ornaments over the last forty years, and most of them have some kind of memory we associate with them. We bought gilded seashells the year we spent Christmas in Hawaii when our son was little and his grandparents wanted him around. We just went along for the ride. Among the hundreds of ornaments we also have little felt dolls of the six wives of Henry VIII that we started collecting the year we took our son to England when he was about eight. We have construction paper stars with glitter glued on that Daniel made in kindergarten and glass balls from the Great Depression that were my wife’s aunt’s. I can't possibly list our ornaments.

Each ornament has a sentimental value and triggers a happy time from the past. But every happy memory carries a sadness that screams what might have been. I can put the tree up. I can put the lights on, although that also triggers memories of dealing with the lights when I lived at home: Christmas tree lights were not cheaply made in China then as they are today. The bulbs were bigger, and the oldest set we owned had gigantic bulbs with big bases strung on ancient silk-wrapped wires. They may well be in the Smithsonian today. If they aren’t, I wouldn’t be surprised that some very similar ones are.

My mother always bought the cheapest tree she could find, usually for less than a dollar, when the going rate was a lot more than that. Usually it looked fine leaning against a wall at the corner tree lot, but when we got it home, sawed off the base and put it in a water-filled tree stand, it usually had the same posture as a corkscrew. No matter which way we turned it, it wasn’t vertical. My father would have spent more for a nice tree, I am sure, but he couldn’t override my mother’s veto. And when it came to Christmas trees, somehow he didn’t have one.

Already frustrated, my engineer father would finally get the tree balanced enough to stand semi-upright and we would begin to play with the lights. I’d untangle them and stretch them out on the floor, and he would scream that I was going to step on them and break them. We wrote that script early in my high school life and as long as I helped with the tree and lights, the next eight or ten years, we never departed from it. Except I learned to swear as I grew older, something my dad never did.

Anyway, these days I can put the tree up and the lights on without flinching, but when it comes to putting on the ornaments, I dissolve. Thus, we ask friends to come to a party and decorate for us.

Last year’s party was especially fun because our Jewish friend Sue had never decorated a Christmas tree before. She went at the ornaments with such enthusiasm that she was a joy to watch. And I didn’t have to touch and remember the association with each one.

We haven’t thought yet about putting up a tree this year, and truthfully it’s early days. And we have been busy so we haven’t thought about having a party – a requirement in my mind for putting up a tree. It's probably too late to plan one.

This year, David is away at college, and Jonathan is a normal busy high school student with his own friends and interests. That is as it should be. But we seldom see David, and never see Jonathan often enough. We, of course, are proud grandparents and twice a day wouldn’t be often enough.

Will it be Christmas without a tree? We may find out.