Holidays

It's only a few days until Christmas, and while my Christmas tree has been up for maybe two weeks, more or less, I finally got around to decorating it.

Before you ask "a competely bare Christmas tree?", it had three strands of lights on it since the afternoon I'd set it up. Just no actual decorations. It's not that we don't have them, I just haven't put them on our tree for a few years now.

There's a reason for this. (Besides sheer laziness; that doesn't quite cover it.) For years, we'd bought live trees from local tree lots, lugged it home, set it up, then decorated it with lights and decorations. Somewhere along the way, we ended up with two large buckets with lids to keep our Christmas stuff in; one bucket was for lights, the other for all other decorations. The light bucket always came off the utility room shelf first; once the lights were on the tree, the other bucket came down and the decorations put up.

Each year, it was the same thing: each decoration represented a family member who'd made the ornament or given it to us. My grandmother had given us quite a few ornaments: ceramic bells shaped like mice with little ceramic clappers that caused a tinkling sound when the mice moved, several clothespins painted to look like Santa Claus, and other trinkets that held memories of going to her house at Christmas time. My ex-mother-in-law had made a few beaded ornaments that we still have, though she's been gone for decades. There are ones that my kids made when they were in grade school. And of course there are others picked up here and there over the years.

Around the time P. and I had gotten together, my daughter M.H. and her husband moved out of state. One of the things they dropped off at our place was a 4-foot artificial tree. It fit nicely on a table top, which is part of why M.H. had bought it in the first place. It's easy enough to put together: simply pull it out of the box, put the lets on the base, pull the branches down, and viola!

However, P. and I simply kept buying real trees. Using the artificial tree felt, well, artificial.

Then, one year, we were a little short on cash. By the time we finally had the money to buy a tree, three weeks before the big day, there wasn't a real tree on any lot to be found without driving miles and miles. So, out came the 4-foot tree.

After setting it up, we threw several strands of blinky lights on it; that was plenty on a tree that size. Then, grabbing the ornament bucket, we found a few ornaments that fit the smaller tree very nicely. There was no way we could use all the decorations; there simply wasn't enough room. Sighing, I put the bucket back on the shelf, half the ornaments still inside.

This tree seemed perfectly fine for the next few years. Then P. died. When I went to set up the tree that year, the lights went on it, but I only had the energy or desire to put one or two ornaments on it. The next year, the ornament bucket didn't even come off the shelf.

A few years ago, I went out and bought a 6-footer. It's still artificial, but I figured I'd get a few years' use out of it. I even bought a few extra strands of lights, since two tiny strands of blinky lights just wouldn't do. But still very few, if any, ornaments. Until now.

My friend Kevin has been spending a lot of time here. He's more like a slightly strange, slightly goofy kid brother, and a friend. Nothing more, nothing less. Contrary to what Billy Crystal's character thought in the first half of When Harry Met Sally, men and women can be friends. He acknowledged the tree and several strands of lights. My son J. even put a strand of lights on that M.H. had given him last year; this strand has maybe a dozen large blood-shot-looking plastic eyes painted on the white globes.

"Cool lights," Kevin mentioned when he saw them.

But then, after a week or so with no other ornaments, he finally asked where they were. "You got the tree, you got the lights, you need to get some ornaments!"

I had to admit, it might be nice to get the bucket down. Last year, I'd used the excuse that our two cats, Karma Kitty and Drexie Calabash, might knock them off the tree and bat them around the house. But there had to be something I could put on the tree that wouldn't cause problems for the two crazy cats. This meant that the few beaded ornaments in the bucket would stay in the bucket, along with a couple of other potentially dangerous ones (dangerous to kitties, anyway). But then, there were other ones I could put on the tree: there's a plastic one that looks almost stained-glass-like and looks nice with a light showing through; there's a star made out of little mirrors (great for reflecting light), and several others that actually look a little nicer than I remember.

The tree is now officially decorated. It won't rival anything in any fancy home decorating magazine. But that's perfectly fine with me.

Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice, Happy (belated) Hanukkah, and Happy New Year.