Oh Tannenbaum

I just ordered a fake Christmas tree. Our apartment building doesn’t allow real trees, so we really had no choice. Plus, now that I am no longer at home on break from school for most of December, it was important to me to decorate our apartment for the season. So I spent the afternoon scouring the internet for an affordable, yet realistic artificial tree. I found beautiful Blue Spruces and Douglas Firs that would take up virtually our entire living room or narrower trees that would cost a small fortune, and finally decided to settle on a rather pathetic looking “slim profile” model that has a footprint small enough to fit in the only non-occupied location in our living room/dining room combo.

The whole experience made me feel inadequate. Growing up, my family always, ALWAYS, had a real tree. My brother and I would spend countless hours in late November and early December trying to convince my parents of the need to get an even bigger and better tree than the year before. When we were really young, we would go to one of those giant tree farms that spread across the countryside to cut our own tree. There was a haywagon shuttle that would drop customers throughout fields of the appropriate height trees. My father still has the rusty yellow handsaw hanging on the wall in our garage that we used to use. And then, when we were done finding the perfect specimen, we’d hope back on the wagon, bind up the tree, share a cup of hot chocolate around the bonfire, and try to stay quiet while my parents figured out how to strap the thing to the top of the station wagon.

Of course, it’s not just buying the tree that is different when you are celebrating your first Christmas on your own—there’s also the question of how to decorate it. There are many schools of thought when it comes to Christmas tree decorating. There are designer Christmas trees with strict color palates, Victorian Christmas trees, Christmas trees with edible garlands, trees with fake birds that look like they are still sitting in the back yard. There are trees with a single ornament in multiple colors; trees covered in ribbons of all widths and textures. Trees with nothing but twinkling lights; and trees with spray glitter paint finishes on the limbs. There are tiny Charlie-Brown Christmas trees that need lots of TLC, and there are mammoth Rockefeller Plaza style trees towering in town squares and office building foyers. There are so many possibilities, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago when I realized how daunting it is to pick what kind of tree I wanted to have.

The daunting part is not choosing which brand of ornament to buy or which stores to check. It is the realization that the kind of tree I want isn’t available by mail order or even at the Pier One I walk past on my way to work. To me, decorating a our Christmas tree is not about making an interior design statement—it is about capturing the memories and moments of Christmas after Christmas, and memorializing those moments for years to come. My parents still have the faded plain red globe ornaments they bought to fill the empty spaces on their first Christmas tree. They have every ornament my mother’s students gave her, and every non-perishable craft ornament my brother and I made at elementary school holiday parties. There are ornaments that use our school pictures, and ornaments that reflect the various hobbies my brother and I picked up over the course of our childhood, from playing the trumpet to collecting rubber duckies, there are ornaments to capture them all. And there is even a doilie angel with tinsel hair that I made as a present to my mom in pre-school.

My parents tree has always been a time capsule, in that regard. Trimming the tree involves a walk down memory lane; an hour long conversation touching on “who gave this to us?” and “where did this one come from” and “why haven’t we thrown this hideous thing out yet” or “is this foam rotting?” There are cracked ornaments from the year the tree fell over on new years morning, and there are hand-made ornaments so hideous and yet so sentimental that we bury them in the interior of the twelve foot tree that will soon adorn my parent’s new home. Their tree tells the story of our entire family—parents, grand-parents, children, grand-children, newlyweds, and first-born children. It is rich story, adorned love and admiration, spanning generations. And so, as I sit and pick out ornaments for our new fake, dinky tree; I find comfort in the fact that this little tree is just the beginning of our own Christmas Story—the first entry in our own time capsule.