Sparking the Spirit

When I was a kid, I accepted that my grandmother, who loved a clean house, had a small, ceramic Christmas tree on a table in her living room.  It was a Christmas tree, so there was acknowledgement of the holiday, and also acknowledgement that her children were grown and the primary reasons, as far as I could see, for anyone to have an elaborate tree, had grown up and moved away, creating little reasons for trees of their own.

Like so many things in life, I never imagined I’d not have a Christmas tree in my house.

2012 was a very challenging year for me on many levels.  Among so many other things going on, I felt overwhelmed by the notion of dragging out the Christmas decorations, trying to decide between tree options (live that could be replanted, live that was giving its life for our amusement, and fake), and decorating the tree. 

You need to understand, too, that my kids are very creative and every year, decorating the Christmas tree is NOTHING like in the movies.  At our house, it turns into a constant, fluid, flowing set of skits, rifts, impromptu roasts, and sometimes-hysterical chaos.  So yeah, I wasn’t up for it in 2012.

But at the last minute, two nights before Christmas eve, I was enveloped by a sense of nostalgia and guilt.  How many times did my parents not feel like “doing Christmas?” I wondered.  So in the freezing cold we drove to the place we always got our trees and in the howling wind, I pointed to a pathetic foot-tall thing and insisted we get it into the trunk.  The kids protested.  I overrode them.

We got the poor relative of the Charlie Brown Christmas tree into the living room and I hand-selected the few ornaments that were so special that it wouldn’t be Christmas without them.  Then we attempted to decorate the little bastard.

“Ow!”

“Ouch! Damn it.”

“Son of a bitch!”

“I told you this tree would suck!”

“What the hell?”

Apparently, the tree was part cactus.  We were literally bleeding all over it trying to put the ornaments on.

We laughed so hard we were now crying on the Cactus-mas tree. 

Game over. 

We left the ornaments on that we managed to airlift and drop onto the sickly branches and called it quits.

Then, in 2013, we were in our new home.  We went to the Christmas tree farm and picked out a beauty.  A cut tree, 8’ tall.  Picked it out in 3 minutes flat.  It was perfect.  It was placed neatly in “the perfect spot” in our living room and remained up for several days after Christmas.  It was so pretty.

And then came 2014.  It has been a crazy, roller coaster year.  Mostly good, but not all good, and certainly even the good was not streamlined.  It’s been a year of learning, let’s leave it at that.  Translation: it’s been an exhausting year.

So I asked the kids (who are 19 and 22), do you care if we don’t have a tree this year?  I mean, I’ll get a little tree in a plant stand so there’s “a tree” but do you care?  I texted this question so they replied in kind.  “No, we don’t care.”

Except they did care.  So on December 19^th, they both said they thought it over and really wanted there to be a tree here. 

But you have a tree at your dad’s house, isn’t’ that enough?

No, we need a place to put all the presents, and we need it to be under a tree.

“Do you care if it’s real or fake?”

“No, but it can’t be that 12” thing you tried to pawn off on us in 2013.  It has to be tree height, not a pseudo bush.”

Marc volunteered to go to the storage unit where he was convinced we had a fake tree.  He returned with a big plastic box marked “Fielding Christmas” but there was no tree.  “Hon, I think we sold it at the garage sale,” he offered.  I told him I thought he was right.

“Can you just go to the store and pick up a small, table-top, fake tree,” I asked him.

“Sure, I’ll do that,” he said.

So on Sunday, December 21, I woke up and emptied out the plastic box of its Christmas decorations, placing them just in the kitchen, dining room, and living room, sparing the rest of the house.  I was pleasantly surprised that Marc had brought my two favorite decorations:  the 3 wise men and a ceramic reindeer.  The two things that I would feel badly about not having up at the holidays, despite my apathy.

And strangely, the Christmas spirit started to take root.

I worked for a few hours in my studio and when I came down, I noticed Marc had bought the two remaining grab bag gifts we needed for my brother’s house.  I thanked him, and then he said, “Did you see the tree?”  I’d completely forgotten that I’d asked him to pick it up.  I figured it would be in a box for me to inspect.  Nope.  He’d put the little tree up on the living room table in the same bay window where the massive tree had stood the year before.  He’d decorated it and put a pretty tree blanket beneath it, covering the tabletop.  I was so strangely gleeful.  I said, oh, you decorated it too.  Thanks for putting the decorations in the bag on the tree too.

He looked perplexed.

You know, the ornaments in the bag in the plastic box.

Still he looked puzzled.

Then I looked more closely. The ornaments were just simple silver balls.  So I thanked him and went to the plastic box and pulled out the ornaments in a small gift bag.  Just a fraction of the many ornaments we’d collected over the years.  And here’s the Christmas miracle part…the ornaments that he’d put in the bag were my very favorite ornaments:  the bumble bee, the wire heart, the rose heart, the ornaments with the kids’ names on them, and probably my favorite, a dough wreath with a photo of my favorite pet ever, Addison, the boxer I had when I was first married.  That ornament was a gift from two of my colleagues at work.  It was the one thing, besides the reindeer and the wise men, that I was feeling badly about not having in the house for Christmas.  And now, there it was on the tiny tree in the window.

I’m reading a lot about being and staying balanced, and trying very hard (seems oxymoronic) to balance my chakras, particularly the first and second ones.  At Christmas time, I was feeling stressed and trying to calm myself by taking things one step at a time and trying to choose wisely between what had to get done and what I could live without.

How grateful I am that the man who means the world to me knew me better than I knew myself.  That in simply simplifying the madness of the holiday season down to a few decorations, a tiny tree, and a handful of ornaments, I could reclaim my vitality and a sense of joyfulness in the world around me. 

I now understand what my grandmother knew all those years ago:  the longer you live, the less you need to rekindle the Christmas spirit.  You just need a few special sparks.