First Published in the Tri-Town Transcript Dec 17, 2015
By Esther C. Baird
Regular Readers know that I love Christmas. We have approximately 200 miles of garland in our home. But more than garland, I love Christmas trees.
I think my love is rooted in my role as ‘Tree #4’ in my elementary school play loosely based, best I can tell, on the E.E. Cummings poem, ‘Little Tree’.
In my riveting scene, I enacted the tree being, “very sorry to come away from its green forest.” I cried out, “Oh no!! What is happening to meeeeeee??”
What did happen to that tree? I’m not sure. Tree #4 went back stage.
But the thought of the tree, needing to find a special, perfect home, haunts me. Each year I try to pick a tree that will feel at home at Casa Baird.
You can imagine my angst then, when I had to pick our tree while still wrapped in a net.
Why? Because I like my trees up by Thanksgiving, which, apparently, is a little early even for Home Depot. But I won’t back down on this point. Christmas decorations make us happy, why not be well fed AND happy at Thanksgiving? Spare me your brown colors and gourds, I want twinkle lights. Many twinkle lights.
My mom was with me when we walked into the garden center full netted trees.
An employee wandered in. “We’ll start opening the trees AFTER Thanksgiving.”
“Hmmm, could you un-net just . . . some?
He frowned. “It would take hours for the branches to drop.”
The question hung in the air: did I plan on standing in the Home Depot garden center for HOURS?
“Ok fine,” I sighed. “How about that one – it’s bursting out of its net.”
He spun it around. “It’s certainly heavy.”
“I feel really good about this tree.” I said to my mom.
My mom nodded supportively, which is what moms do, so naturally I took it as wholehearted agreement.
And so our tree came home, and we set and straightened it and then . . . cut the net.
Whoa. Our special, perfect tree had a LOT of branches. They shot out in crazy directions and exploded across the corner of our living room. It was a rotund, full, dense tree except . . . for its lower right corner.
When our friends came over for Thanksgiving, one said, “Well it’s a great tree, but, what if you put a really large present right there?” She pointed at the lower right section.
Alas. I had no large present because, dear Regular Readers, I burn bright and early with my decorating passion but my candle burns low, so very low, when it’s time to wrap. I mean . . . all that tape and paper. Who can stand it!?
Instead, we turned the tree around so the hole faced the back. But by morning our tree was decidedly unhappy with the rotation and expressed its annoyance by tipping away from the wall.
Actually, tipping barely begins to describe what it was doing.
It was leaning towards our bookshelf which also held our nativity set. For reasons I’ll never understand, this year we have three baby Jesus figures, a clay Rudolph, poncho-wearing shepherds my mother brought from Mexico, and our historically inaccurate blond hair and blue eyed Precious Moment wisemen – – plus a marble. Perhaps the tree was putting out a distress signal, “Rescue me from these Type A tyrants!”
But it had a gap, I had to turn it! The E.E. Cummings poem said, “every finger shall have a ring and there won’t be a place dark or unhappy.” I had done that! I’d covered our tree’s dark place and given it rings. But it was unhappy and, I might add, increasingly horizontal.
So we righted our tree. And we let the gap show.
And I guess, going into this Christmas season, that’s the point. We come with holes and gaps.
We get annoyed and may even tilt away at times. We aren’t perfect. But in our family we celebrate one who is perfect. We celebrate, not three, but one baby who was born to make all our holes and gaps and funny tilts into something that is beautiful. We celebrate that at Christmas we can stand proudly and, as the poem says, “dance and sing ‘Noel Noel’.”