I had no intention of getting a tree this Christmas. It was almost the third week of December. It’s just my dog and me. I wasn’t planning on entertaining this year. What was the point? But just outside the entrance to Whole Foods, I spotted a fresh tabletop pine in a bright red plastic stand and instinctively placed it in my cart. It stuck out of the basket, obstructing my view, so I rolled it over to the customer service desk.
“Is it OK if I leave this here while I shop?” I asked the clerk. “Just put it right there,” she said, pointing toward the floor in front of the desk. “Nobody will take it.” She was right. No one was going to steal my Charlie Brown tree.
“All it needs is a little love,” I thought to myself.
Back in the day, I would’ve made a huge production out of Christmas tree hunting. My then-husband and I would make a day out of it, driving to a tree farm in the country where we’d chop down the biggest Frasier Fir we could find. One that brushed the 12-foot coffered ceiling of our Victorian painted lady in Rochester, New York. One we could fill with the dozens of ornaments we’d collected over a couple of decades of marriage.
But that was a different time. A different life. I grabbed the pint-sized spruce out of the back of my sport wagon and carried it inside along with my groceries.
Before moving to Park City, I’d downsized my extensive ornament collection to a handful of favorites. There was a carol-singer lady I’d fashioned out of a powder puff and some scraps of felt when I was a kid. A small brass bicycle I’d gotten in a Secret Santa exchange in my first professional writing gig. A tiny gold Eiffel Tower my mother had given my husband and me just before we’d moved to Paris one year. A handpainted angel frame with a picture of my then-6-year-old godchild on which she’d crudely lettered “To Kate, Love Dana.” They were all bubble-wrapped along with a few other ornaments inside an old Forever 21 shoebox. I’d blacked out the 21 with a Sharpie and relabeled the box XMAS FOREVER ORNAMENTS.
Inside the box was also a stocking my mother had knitted when I was a baby. My mother always insisted she wasn’t a knitter. But, over the years, she managed to stitch and embellish stockings for my father, brother, sister and me. Mine has a chubby Santa with a white angora beard inside of a wreath embellished with beaded hollyberries. Taking my stocking out of the box, I realized there was something in there: a metal tin with a lump of coal, a ghost of Christmas past.
My mother claims to hate shopping for stocking gifts. Which may be true, but we all know opening them together has always been her favorite part of the holiday. When the socks were full, “Santa X,” as Mom called herself, would put the overflow into Wegmans grocery bags. My parents would make us wait at the top of the stairs on Christmas morning. We were allowed to descend one step at a time, the pace closely monitored by my father. To this day, I don’t know what they were doing in the family room while we sat there on the stairs, listening to my Pop’s Kenwood speakers blasting Stan Kenton holiday tunes.
Some years ago I unearthed an audio cassette my father had secretly made. The tape has since been lost, but I know the opening lines by heart. It begins with Mom laughing and shaking jingle bells while my father proclaims in his best Edward R. Murrow: “Welcome to Christmas morning, 30 Orchard Lane, December 1979. You will not believe what you are about to hear.” The recording goes on for the entire length of Christmas morning, featuring the ambient background of packages being violently ripped open, our miniature Schnauzer Willie barking and my little sister Carrie’s now legendary admonishment to us all to “hold yer panties!” She always knew how to savor the moment.
Even as adults, we’d all gather at my parents’ place on Christmas morning to open our stockings together — or as Carrie and I referred to them, “The Bag of Useless Objects.” Inside would be a random sampling of inventory from the Dollar Store. No matter how useless each present was, we’d reluctantly admit to eventually finding a use for almost all of them. A deflated Mylar smiley face balloon. An envelope of dried French onion soup mix. Chapstick. Some menthol cough drops. A bag of plastic Halloween spiders. Rubber gloves. A chip clip. A mini tube of white chocolate Pringles. Christmas underwear. Somewhere there’s a picture of all of us wearing Santa underpants on our head.
My mother made us go one at a time even though we’d all get basically the same stuff. So if my brother-in-law opened a wedge-shaped plate for one slice of pizza, you could be pretty sure a plastic pizza plate would soon be in your life, too. The whole process often lasted as much as four hours. When it was his turn, my Pop was famous for holding up the wrapped item and making Dad jokes about what might be inside while we impatiently drained our mimosas.
What I wouldn’t give to spend four hours with him now.
The other day, my phone pinged that I had a package at the UPS store. I recognized my Mom’s perfect cursive on the address label. Back home, I opened the box, and slowly removed the Wegmans bags that lovingly cushioned its contents. One by one, I unwrapped the tissue-papered presents. A clothespin snowman. A brass Oak Hill Christmas Ball favor from 2007. A Little Orphan Annie figurine. A tiny Dr Seuss book.
HOP POP. We like to hop. We like to hop on top of Pop. STOP. You must not hop on Pop.
I hung the book on top of my little tree and plugged in the colored lights. It was Christmas after all.