And the pressure is starting to take its toll. Luckily, I have a wonderful sister-in-law who has offered to have Christmas Eve over at her house this year, which means that not only do I not need to worry about making a meal and cleaning the house, I may not even need to put up a tree! That gives me at least six extra hours this year!
But even yesterday in my errand run (and I move fast lately, so for your own safety, stay off Routes 4 and 6 until after the 25th of December) I had the thought of buying yet another fake tree, this time fully assembled and complete with lights, to save time and to have the tree that really somewhere deep inside of me still has a special meaning. Since it doesn’t mean all that much to my spouse, I don’t put him through the intricacies of dealing with it.
But even with the stress and deadlines of a retail business during the holiday season, somehow I usually succumb to the emotional need for a tree eventually and manage to get something, some semblance of a tree up before Christmas Eve. In years past I’ve run uptown to the local Agway around December 23rd and Ron there has always found something that was usable. A couple years ago I broke down and bought an artificial tree as a back-up, but that’s more trouble than a real tree and doesn’t smell good anyway (no, I wouldn’t stoop so low as to buy a fir-tree spray scent). What I miss, and will admit here that I still do every Christmas, is to lay on my back underneath the sparkling, lit-up tree at night, and make faces at one of the larger reflecting metallic ornaments, usually a red or gold one, purposely hung on a lower branch for that very reason. I’ve done this since I was a kid, and for some reason it just seems to take all the magic of Christmas and focus it into that one globe that becomes the world and me in it.
No one has ever seen me do this. And now only you know about it, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology