December 21, 2011
Wednesday

Someday, when I write what I’ve always seen as the sequel to Here Are Poinsettias: A Child’s Christmas in Harrisburg, when I write those stories of how I jingled all the way through adolescence and young adulthood, through totally secular Christmases and my Christmas Eve in a Greyhound bus bound for Chicago, to the warmth and joy that has been mine these past 28 years, I will write my history with Christmas trees. A little of it, the story of how we acquired the present artificial model, is told here. I hope the old one is still in service.

For most of these 28 joy-filled years, I have endeavored to get the tree and the other decorations in place by the First Sunday in Advent. That was November 27 this year, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Along about the second week in November, however, I began thinking that putting on a full-frills, all-trimmings Christmas this year was going to tax me both emotionally and physically. Just before Thanksgiving, I made a list of the elements of the outer Christmas that were most important to me. In order, they were: the Advent wreath, the creche, the American Girls Kirsten doll decked out like the Lussibruden, the “Oh So Softly” Daisy Kingdom Christmas banner I made in 1985 that hangs above the display of Lynn’s pictures with Santa Claus, and, last, the tree.

This is not a blue Christmas, nor a depressed Christmas. Just a quiet Christmas. I made good on every item on my list, in order. The Advent wreath was ready for the first Sunday, although I did have to go to three stores the night before to find the candles. I think the creche went up two days later, and by the end of that first week the Lucy doll and the Santa pictures were out. And though I bought a new Lenox ornament for the tree, as of Saturday the tree itself was still in its box in the basement.

I thought back to the years of my adult life when I didn’t have a Christmas tree. In 1970 I was in my first solo apartment, a cramped space whose main attraction was a window seat and a purple bathtub. I was leaving for a week in Colorado the day after Christmas, and it seemed pointless to haul in a tree and purchase decorations for it. In 1971 I had a nicer apartment and a real tree. It dropped needles like crazy, but I remember that dismantling it and sweeping up after it became a time of laughter with the boyfriend who had taken me to Colorado and the neighbors across the hall, who brought over their powerful Hoover upright when my little sweeperette sputtered and stalled.

By 1972 the boyfriend was laughing with someone else, and I was in the early stages of a depression — a full bore clinical depression with some days on which I was awake only from 7 in the morning to about 4:30, my work day — that lasted more than two years. It was that Christmas that Sherry gave me a Norfolk Island pine.

I wrote about Sherry this summer. She came to my mind the day I visited Barneys, and on a whim I typed her name into Facebook, though we hadn’t been in touch for more than 30 years. She responded, and we have reconnected, one of the loveliest legacies of my Summer in the City.

In 1972 she was living near Philadelphia with her husband of two years. We were still in touch frequently, and I know I went to see her a few times. She had bolstered me through the breakup with the first boyfriend, and through the rebound relationship that lasted a very short time but left me feeling even more lacking in self-worth and attractiveness. “You need a Christmas tree!” she said. When she and her husband visited their families sometime in December, she brought me a Norfolk Island pine. I know it had some little red bows on it. She may have put some little balls and some tinsel on it as well.

I had that tree for several years afterward. I had it the next year, the very worst stage of the depression, when I spent Christmas Eve on a Greyhound bus bound for Chicago in an attempt to develop yet another relationship that would not work out. I hit bottom in 1974, got angry at everybody, married the first man I fell into a relationship with, and had a checkered history with Christmas and Christmas decorations until 1983, when I was finally able to grow into this lovely life I now have. I know I had that little tree for four, maybe five years. I don’t remember how it met its end.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how important the offering of that tree was. It was a gift that said, You are important to me. I am thinking of you. Who knows, but it may have been that little bit of greenery, small but still doing its part to replenish the oxygen in my House of Blues, that kept me from becoming completely lost. So last Saturday, when I knew I just didn’t have the emotional resources to do the full-fa-la-la tree treatment, I went to the nursery out on Linglestown Road, chose a Norfolk Island pine, some tiny balls in blue and silver, a string of lights, a star, and a whimsical sign. I put the Lenox ornament I got for this year under it instead of on it.

It sits in the kitchen, just across from where I sit each morning. I turn the lights on when I come down for C&C. They say that after tonight, the darkest evening of the year, things get brighter day by day, but that lengthening light is so subtle it’s hard to discern. I think this little tree will be my morning companion well into February. And every time I look at it, I will bless Sherry, who loved me enough almost forty years ago to give me a tree, and the friend who called tonight to ask after my emotional state, though he has his own big changes to contend with, and every single person who will read this or think of me this holdiay season. Thank you for so much, so often.