Editor’s note: it is the month of December and for many bloggers it is the season of “Blogmas”. It is a marathon of posting every day for the month of December, often with a holiday theme. For some crazy reason I have dived into this as motivation to clear out some drafts and repost some posts from the last 6 years with a refresh. And maybe a few new stories! I am still working on my Christmas spirit, it hasn’t quite returned to what it once was.
Yes, sometimes Christmas is crap. You work hard every year so it doesn’t entirely suck but sometimes you fail miserably. All those expectations. There will be no fluffy gratitude post this year, even though I have plenty of gratitude. Just not feeling it. If that is what you are in the mood for, you can go read my post All The Ways My Cup Runneth Over. But if you could use a little “the holidays suck” commiseration, read on my friend, read on.
O Christmas tree, o Christmas tree
How lovely are thy branches
O Christmas tree, o Christmas tree
How lovely are thy branches
I don’t remember exactly what year it was but I am guessing it was sometime after when my dad decided to get sober when I was 16 and before I left for college around 20 because I could drive. Christmas was approaching and I asked when we would be getting our tree and I was told that we weren’t. My parents were not bothering with a tree that year.
How could you have Christmas without a tree? Yes, our family was going to crap but there will be a tree by golly. So, I took my baby brother down to the corner Christmas tree lot and we picked out a tree for the family. My memory wants to say I could drive because I don’t have a memory of dragging that tree the 8 blocks home. Maybe I should ask my brother…the one getting his mouth stuffed. Note the flocked Christmas tree my grandparents always had. I think one year it was actually pink.
We brought it home and decorated it. I don’t remember how the rest of that Christmas went but from that point on the whole paradigm of Christmas had changed. I now knew that what lay ahead of me was a lifetime of uncertain Christmas futures. The promise of a joyous Christmas was a lie. Don’t get me wrong, Christmas was and will always be about celebrating the birth of Jesus for me. Candlelight service and Silent Night. I’m talking about the promise of all the other trappings that come with it that we look forward to every year.
A few years later my parents split up and Christmas completely went to crap. Sure, I was in college and then soon after newly married myself but the peace and calm that the season should promise yet again was glaringly absent. Why couldn’t at least Christmas be a “safe zone”? My 5 brothers and sisters and I receiving gifts clearly picked up at some airport gift shop or ordered uniformly online and venturing between two homes like some sort of limbo, no one knew what to do. I get it, there were 6 of us. But where was Christmas in all of that?
This year went down in family folklore, the year of matching vests. Don’t get me wrong, I helped my dad with the ordering. I’m just not sure that I realized they would be color coded by birth order. The girls all came first, then all the boys so it is yellow: first girl/boy, blue: second boy/girl, green: third girl/boy. I think I was the only one who really wore mine after that day.
We are in general a well behaved group. But with all of us and my mom (my dad was pretty much doing his own thing, most likely to avoid all that stress of expectation and noise), the decision making process around what to do for Christmas was tedious and crap. Sure, we still had my grandfather at the time, so there was still that. That was one thing that didn’t change. Whether we went to his home or he came to ours, at least there was still Grandpa. He’s been gone 9 years now and with it the last of my childhood Christmas traditions left. Did I mention he died two weeks before Christmas and his funeral was 2 days before Christmas? Yeah, crap.
Your boughs so green in summertime
Stay bravely green in wintertime
O tannenbaum, o Christmas tree
How lovely are thy branches
At some point after that first chaotic Christmas, I decided to create a new tradition and hopefully avoid all that angst. I bought The Christmas Story movie and said to everyone, let’s all go out to Chinese and then come home and watch the movie together. We, also, started doing a gift exchange instead of having to buy for everyone. There are 6 of us, remember?
It was well accepted and became our tradition for quite a few years. I’d make reservations down at the local Chinese restaurant and we would meet at someone’s home close by to exchange gifts. Sometimes our table would have over 20 people: kids, extended family and friends. It got to the point that our regular family style reservation meant that we ended up with extra plates of food on the table that no one ordered. And soooo many fortune cookies.
When we started doing this, we were often one of only a handful of families in the restaurant, but over the years there were more and more of us there. Families taking refuge from the chaos of cooking Christmas dinner and enjoying fortune cookies instead. Now however, with more than half of us being either vegan or gluten free, dinner has gone back to potluck at someone’s house. It was rather disappointing to give up and I resisted at first. Not the Chinese food but the tradition. And not having to decide what we were doing every year. But I had to remind myself of that famous Christmas song: let it go, let it go, let it go…
Over the years people got tired of watching the movie so we began going to the movie theater instead after dinner. Again, we were usually one of only a few people there Christmas afternoon. But the last few years we have found that everyone else has caught on to our tradition and the theater has been packed! Like the Chinese food, I must have told too many people. Now we just stay home and decorate gingerbread houses instead (maybe my idea, I’m not sure). The stress of getting there early and hoping for good seats was not worth it, even for the latest Star Wars movie. (There has been talk of Mary Poppins this year, but I will be staying home, thank you).
Let us all remember
In our gift giving and our merriment
With our family and friends and loved ones
The real and true meaning of Christmas
The birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ
Just like me, my husband has a lot of history and baggage tied up with Christmas. Since his divorce 9 years ago, what little time he gets with his children is precious. Going to get the Christmas tree, being able to select thoughtful gifts and spending time all together for a few hours on Christmas Day mean everything to him. He clings to these traditions like a sailor to a life raft.
Unlike me, he has very little control over the time he spends with his children. A very rigid parenting plan and an ex-wife who cares little for empathy and a lot about parent alienation. I didn’t have that divorce, thankfully. We put our son first when it came to family time. His family always went to the beach cabin for Thanksgiving, so my son was always with his father that weekend. His family celebrated Christmas Eve, so he was always with his father that day, too. And I always had Christmas Day and sometimes his dad even came over that morning. We celebrated my son’s birthday with one big party. None of that crappy every other year stuff or splitting up a holiday down the middle King Solomon style.
Even when I got tired of the drama of alcoholism and his dad got tired of what little responsibility he had to left to give and moved back to Texas around middle school age, the routine of the holidays didn’t change. Even now, my son may not go to the cabin for Thanksgiving because he works, but he still goes to his dad’s family for Thanksgiving dinner at some point on the the weekend and he’s with them some day before Christmas as they, too, have had to accommodate a growing family and different schedules. And he and I still celebrate Christmas morning together and with my family in the afternoon. Sometimes, however, I do try to talk my son into taking off to Hawaii for Christmas but he hasn’t taken me up on that either.
But I digress, this story is supposed to be about the Christmas tree.
O tannenbaum, o tannenbaum
How lovely are, are thy branches
O tannenbaum, o tannenbaum
How lovely are, how lovely are thy branches
When my son was younger and his dad and I were still together, we usually joined with some of my siblings (or our friends) to go out to a tree farm and cut a tree down. Santa might be there and a train with hot cocoa. If we were lucky there was snow. Donning mittens and scarves, we’d walk the rows of trees looking for just the right one and bring it home to decorate.
The tradition continued for a few years as my siblings had children and even after his dad and I split up. Sometimes it all went off without a hitch and sometimes there were complete meltdowns. I have a memory of trying to get a screaming, squiggling child in to a car seat at the tree farm and wondering why people even do this. I knew why I wanted to do it. Tradition. And the smell of fresh pine in the house. I never understood my friends with the fake trees, how could they?
I don’t remember the exact year but I am guessing it was around middle school (probably not a coincidence) that my son lost interest in going to get a tree. Oh, he wanted there to be a real tree in the house for Christmas, he just didn’t want to go get it. Defeated, I must have just gone and bought one at the corner lot again. I couldn’t just go to the tree farm without my child.
That was our last real tree because Target had a fake one for $10 on clearance soon after and in a weak moment I bought it. Why should I spend $60+ dollars every year for the headache of getting a real tree by myself or with a child who didn’t want to go? There have been no regrets, pine needles to sweep up or Boy Scouts to pay to haul it away afterwards ever since.
I had that small fake tree for quite a few years, never upgrading to one with pre-hung lights. I milked the life out of that tree. Already felt guilty enough about the plastic and that one day it would end up in a landfill, even when it became wobbly and the stand stood it up at a slight angle I stuck by it. My son, of course, hated it. Not hated it, hated it, but why don’t we have a real tree hated it. I told him if he wanted to take back up the tradition of going to get a real tree at the farm I would entertain the idea but I never got any takers.
Then, about 3 or 4 years ago while cruising Pinterest, I saw all the pictures of how creative and ingenious people were decorating their homes without even having a tree, real OR plastic. They were using books and boxes and ladders. Hey, I had a ladder. An old weathered one I bought at an estate sale and was leaning up against a wall in the house waiting for some Martha inspiration. I could do that. It looks slightly like this but baking themed…
That was when my Christmas Ladder was born. I opened it up in the front window to make a upside down “V” and stacked tin boxes underneath in a descending order to represent a tree shape. Then, I hung simple white lights and a few decorations and I was DONE. Hallelujah.
The pillars all please faithfully
Our trust in God unchangedly
O tannenbaum, o tannenbaum
How love, lovely are thy branches
I clung to other traditions, instead. I have given my son some of the same stocking stuffers for years, things like a holiday Pez dispenser, orange tic -tacs and car magazines. I don’t even know if he likes orange tic-tacs anymore. We sleep in and I make breakfast with Little Smokies and hot cocoa before over to one of my sibling homes for lunch, gift exchange and gingerbread houses.
I knew that my new marriage would mean the end of the Christmas Ladder. My husband and his kids have the tradition of actually going out in to the woods to get their tree. They get a permit tag from the forest service, drive up a forest road near Snoqualmie Pass and traipse around until they find the least Charlie Brown tree they can. Two years ago, they did it in waist high snow. They love it and I love that they love it.
So, when the holiday season approached this year, I had imagined us all going to get the Christmas tree together. Even my son got excited when I told him the real tree tradition would be returning. I imagined we have this wonderful day on a weekend when my husband had his kids, filled with making sugar cookies, listening to carols and decorating all together. Yeah, right.
What was I thinking? Of course, his daughter would want to get her own tree for her house and and just like all the years before would expect to be planning getting their trees together with her dad. And of course, she would ask her dad to do it when she had the boys on a non-kid weekend their mother is out of town and he would say yes, even though it meant not having the boys come home with us afterwards. And he then promptly forgot agreeing to it.
And here I am over here logically thinking it will happen on a kid weekend where we will have the boys to go with my imagined Christmas tree fantasy day. And when the two collided, I made the mistake of standing up for my expectation, thinking it certainly had to be his, too. Not an expectation about the tree, trees are crap. I cared about my expectation of spending time together at our home as a family. As a couple. Needless to say, it was a nightmare.
We did eventually get a tree after much duress and the event wasn’t completely crap. I even got to witness my son scrambling up the side of a mountain (albeit briefly). Sure, decorating the tree wasn’t smooth, goodness we have a lot of decoration and very few branches. But is was some resemblance of a salvaged expectation, nonetheless.
O Christmas tree, o Christmas tree
How lovely are thy branches
O Christmas tree, o Christmas tree
How lovely are thy branches
I don’t know about you, but for me it was and is never about the Christmas Tree. Me, I really could care less about the stupid tree at this point. Terrible to say, I’m sure. And I feel bad for all the keepsake ornaments I have, especially the ones my son had made or a deceased loved one has given. What do you do with them without a tree? I’ll just call it mental preparation for my tiny house life.
But what I cling desperately to is peace, calm and the promise of the season. Being with loved ones. And I’m not entirely certain who the crazy person is (me) who can’t seem to always choose to let it go in the name of of those things. Can’t seem to realize that what I think is important may not be the most important thing after all.
I’m not sure how our actual Christmas Day will turn out, that has yet to be seen but I’m sure it will not be how I want it. Exactly how anyone wants it. Uncomfortable new family gatherings or adult children not wanting to participate at all and watered down versions of what used to be. It has not been easy and my husband and I are feeling battered and bruised from the clashing of dearly held expectations.
But hopefully, finally, somewhere it the middle of all the chaos there will be those three things: peace, calm and loved ones. Appreciating the little moments of joy when they happen, whether it be the smile on a child’s face, the glow from a string of lights or Christmas carols song by a choir.
And I pray the same for you.
Editor’s note: this post is based heavily on my memories and as my brother the qualified-to-testify-in-court-that-noone’s-memories-can-be-trusted PhD would probably say, you can’t take them as fact. Facts matter little to affairs of the heart. And coincidentally, this brother is the same one that went with me to get that tree long ago. At least I think he was.
Editor’s second note: Sorry (not sorry) about all the crap. Trust me, this is the clean version of this year’s Christmas…
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