The Tree Discussion

Every year at about this time, Kathy and I have the Tree Discussion. If we must have a tree, she wants a small tabletop model, much like her mother used in her later years. For my part, I lobby for a monster that goes to the ceiling. Sometimes we compromise, and I buy a four or five foot tree. One year we were leaving for a cruise right after New Year’s Day, so we bought a too expensive evergreen decoration from LL Bean and plopped in the front window and called it done.

This year, she tried a different tack. Since Stuart Little’s relatives have been showing up in the basement traps lately, she said, “What if a mouse gets into it!?” I thought, oh swell, here we go again. I left the room for a while and came back to get my breakfast out of the microwave (blueberry pancakes I’d made last week, if you must know.)

She said, “Are you upset with me?”, because of course she knows me. Instead of denying it, I said, “I’m hurt and I’m mad about not having a tree” and left it at that for the time being.

I went off the bank, she went off shopping with her sister.

As I drove I tried to figure out why I had reacted that way and why I felt hurt. This comes up every year, after all, so I should have figured it out by now. I usually push down feelings but this time I admitted them—in several senses. I admitted I had them, and admitted them to my consciousness.

This is what I came up with: when I was a kid, we always had a tree that towered over us, smushed against the family room ceiling, decorated with those horrendously inefficient big bulbs. Some had liquid in them that bubbled when they got warm. This is safe? Glass ornaments whose population dwindled each year, due to dropsy; kid-crafted masterpieces and miscellaneous mismatched doo dads dangled from its branches. And tinsel, great gobs of tinsel were strewn over its mass, clumped and dumped until we learned to lay each piece individually to be the ‘icicles’ the box proclaimed they were.

I want a tree like that. Every time.

The darn tree connects me to my youth. Setting up the yuletide shrub is encoded in my DNA. First choose a seven foot cheap old white pine, cut off the bottom three inches to keep the veins open, stick it in the stand and then weave the lights around the branches, then the ornaments then the tinsel then the garland. This sequence is as much a part of my genetic makeup as the markers for blue eyes and distinguished gray hair. Lemmings, salmon, men in my family. Same thing.

Further, it makes me feel young. I’m again a young father doing something for his kids. They aren’t here to see it, so maybe it’s not for them after all. Not putting up a tree is admitting I’m too old to bother. Never! I’ll drag myself to the tree on my last day, stringing the lights just so, to make the tree appear to be lit from within. It’s my light, flickering still, glowing brighter, searing the Christmas night.