Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree, in the eyes of a child they are all 30 feet high
Of course, in amongst the packing and the prep work…it’s Christmas. Of course, I’ll be away for Christmas, just as I’ll be away for Yule, but my family – as always – is amazingly understanding, and we move the holidays nearly every year to accommodate when I’m actually going to be in town.
This house…at Christmas…people don’t believe me until they see it for themselves. The think I’m exaggerating, because everyone thinks their house is the most amazing over the holidays.
I’m not exaggerating.
Of course, before the trees are put up – or sometimes while they’re going up – everything else has to go up around them. Lit garlands drape down the stair-rails like something out of a Victorian Christmas card, a giant handcrafted nutcracker takes up residence in the front window (his name is Josh, and my mother made him when I was so small I don’t remember a Christmas without him) and a big red satin bow gets tied to the support of the open baby grand in the living room.
The pictures that live in the house year ‘round come down and get put in storage, and every one is replace with a framed puzzle; everything from Santa Clause to the Twelve Days of Christmas (that one’s my favourite). Every one of those puzzles we’ve done over the years, at first we didn’t glue them when we framed them, so a great many of them are still doable, some though were done only once before being framed in red and designated a place on the wall. There’s one though, that hangs in the living room, which we did every year from the time I was a little girl. The whole family has that puzzle memorized, we could put it together in an hour while blindfolded, but we’ve never rushed it – that puzzle is Christmas Eve and egg nogg with nutmeg, the crackle of a wood burning fireplace, and fresh mandarin oranges by the sparkle of the lights, and the King Singer’s on the record player (first record I ever remember handling, and I have every scratch of it memorized)
And then…there are the trees…and yes, that’s plural…and it’s not a typo…
The house has four trees. No, I really mean that. Four trees. Every one of the four big front facing windows in the house has a tree visible in it, one in the living room, the dining room, and both the upstairs bedroom. And I don’t mean tiny trees; I mean proper full sized trees. Two are live (the main one in the living room, and the one in my parents’ room above) the other two are artificial. Each has its own theme. Mine has the ornaments I’ve collected from childhood, and as I travel I add things to it, my parent’s tree is all blue and white, the dining room tree is the memory tree – all angels and musical instruments.
And the main tree? The main tree is nine feet high, its spire brushing the top of our living room ceiling. We phone in the order early, I think ours is probably the first tree the lot owner goes out to find. It doesn’t have a theme, it doesn’t have a unified colour scheme, but every ornament on that tree has a story; there are pieces on there purchased specifically to represent family members who have long since taken up residence in the Summerlands, ornaments that have been passed down from my grandmother and her mother, ornaments I’ve brought back from all over the world, that I bought for my mother and father when I was a little girl saving quarters. It has two sides, because we put it in the archway that divides the living room from the sunroom that – long ago – was an open sunporch before some bright spark finally realized that open sunporches are not a smart idea in a climate that involves as much rain as ours does.
That tree…has its own kind of magic. And every year we haul it into the house and think that this year it won’t work, that it’ll be too small or two short or too…something…and every year we’re wrong, because every year we make it work.
And every year, it takes my breath away…
There used to be more of us of course, over the years, people have left; have moved on in one way or another, sometimes permanently. But those people – they never really leave, they’re still here, in the laughter as we put up the mantelpiece village, in the angels we hang on the memory tree. Of course, not everyone is gone for good, some are simply not in the city…and there are people…that I would give anything to have here, that I would give anything to share this with. People who are a plane ride and a long distance phone call away and there’s just nothing to be done about that…
But those people are still here too…I can hear them at my shoulder, so real sometimes that I whirl around expecting to bump into them only to find they aren’t there. Perhaps that makes me crazy, but if so – well…I don’t want to be sane…
Like the song says…
Through the years we all will be together if the fates allow
Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow…
So have yourself a Merry Little Christmas now…