I want to share a picture of my family’s Christmas tree. Because, as I found out recently, it does not look like anyone else’s that I know. I found this out when I was at my girlfriend’s house decorating a Festivus pole (her family’s own unique and strange tradition). I was handing a frost covered pine-cone to where she perched on a ladder next to their column of ornaments and asked, “What is this made out of?” Then someone explained to me the way that companies make designer ornaments, which flew completely over my head, and I listened in bafflement. I mean this designer ornament thing is a whole industry! But everything is, let me back up for a second, I’ll explain why this pine-cone sent me into a major revelation.
When I think about my Christmas past I am flooded with warm nostalgia. I remember crouching to the warm glow of my family’s desktop, in a room that no longer exists in our house or most probably any suburban home called “the computer room,” doing what I’d do any other time of the year except with a holiday twist. I remember one distinct Christmas, I was downloading and playing myriad Christmas themed Minecraft mods and adventure maps, when my mom pried me from the screen.
I was always the last one to be rounded up, I would walk down the stairs in my living room where the other members of my family sat, then (sometimes it was already there sometimes I would be chosen to venture into the cold concrete of our storage room and grab it) we would pry the top off of their beloved Arc de Hanson. This was a storage box (a plastic bathtub if you will [one of the largest storage containers in the house]) filled with our own form of holy relic. It was from top to bottom full of ornaments, and these were not designer, they were made of Play-do, Legos, purchased from souvenir shops the time our family went to Disney. They came in droves, and there seemed to be no common theme, the tub was full of Star Wars characters missing heads, plastic saxophones, one or two glittery food items. My dad would hit play on our analog airport express to the family playlist, a mix of Bear Naked Ladies, Straight No Chaser, and hundreds of jazz standard Christmas albums, and away we would go for the next hour to decorate our tree. Mom bounced around the room, emphatically pointing to tiny plaster pieces roughly formed into rings, asking me if I remembered the time I made this. No Mom, I was four, but thanks for asking. I hated it, those years it was everything I could do to empty the bag labeled “Ethan fragile” as fast as possible, my only ambition was to return to the glow of that old Macintosh.
If anything, it’s only gotten worse. Last year I think I put off decorating the tree until the week or two before Christmas, because, with my brother in college, there’s no one pushing except my mom. I could put the blame on finals week building so much stress into me that I don’t have time. But even if I had all of December off I’d find some way to spend the time ignoring my mom’s wishes to decorate the house.
This year I was in the basement, curled up, watching some dystopian fiction that seriously gets me. I only needed a little push. I’ve learned by now the faster that it gets done the faster Mom will stop asking.
When I came up stairs this year and took the paper off of a Finding Nemo “Crush” ornament, with Squirt missing a head, I smiled, because other people’s trees don’t look anything like ours.
Our tradition has changed a little over the years. My brother is in college, so my Mom bags up “his” ornaments, and no one is allowed to touch them until he gets back. So, my Dad presses airplay on the newest edition of our family playlist, and we hang ornaments on our 2nd version of a plastic Christmas tree, and now I’m finally tall enough to hang the ornaments near the top. However, the thing that’s changed most is me, and I wanted some damn questions answered.
Like, “why do we have a star of David on our tree?” Well, apparently my brother made the thing at a church camp as some act of defiance or childhood ignorance. “Well where did this Yoda with a missing ear come from?” Oh well there was a Star Wars release that year and we bought in bulk twenty random characters. “What about this one?” well that one was from 1976 the year that my aunt, my mother’s sister, was born.
And as she’s explaining why and how she kept a glass ornament in perfect condition in a box in our basement for the last forty-four years I realized something. Whether it’s the Irish Catholic in our family or just some weird quirk of a suburban life, we don’t scrapbook, we measure time and memories of our family in cheap plaster Christmas ornaments. And I began to realize that she and my dad know the story behind all of the 50 or 60 some odd glittery pieces hanging on our tree. That’s thoroughly impressive, not that I’m going to tell them that, but it is, and I think in their way they know I’m impressed.
Some years ago, my mom gave me her old work laptop, and I think I understand why now. So this year, instead of scurrying back down to the basement, I sat in our living room asking about each ornament and writing this essay. I’m not great yet, I still need a computer as a crutch, but I’m getting better.
And this year I outlasted them. They were the ones to get bored and decide to go watch T.V in the other room. And now its just me, my computer, and our tree.
And then the tree’s timer clicked it off.
And a tear is rolling down my face, lit from the light of this laptop, like I’m the protagonist of a Christmas movie about the power of love.
Because after all those years I wished I weren’t here, I finally won’t be. Next year I’ll be in college working on whatever dream I’ve decided to follow. I’ll be flying home in time to pick up my bag of ornaments and I will savor every second of it. And the only thing I’ll be able to do to apologize for all those years I hid in my room is send back ornaments from the souvenir shops I come across. And that won’t be enough to make up for it, but it’ll be enough for my mom, because she never really blamed me in the first place. Ok, there it is, that’s my holiday story for the year, Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals.
