tradition

I know it's early, but I put my Christmas tree up the day after Thanksgiving.

Back in the 70's I began my own holiday practices. My folks still lived up north in Christmas card country, but I was hours away building a life of my own and excitedly started collecting holiday ornaments for my own tree. It was important to me to have rituals and traditions beyond those shared with my folks each year, silently acknowledging the inevitability of there being no family home and hearth to return to one day.

I'd suffered through my father's experiments with artificial trees when I was growing up. Not one to pitch a fit, I nonetheless kept trying to make a case with empassioned pleas for a "real" tree, but failed annually in the face of his fears of a fire. Safety trumped the sensuous.

The most memorable was an aluminum tree sprouting curled silvery explosions at the end of each branch. In hindsight it kind of looked like something from Dr. Seuss. I think we hung royal blue glass ornaments against the silver. Today it would be considered retro or kitsch. I guess my father was being creative and experimental but my adolescent sensibilities were offended.

I never tired of my mother telling us about Christmas when she was growing up in Philadelphia. Her family's tiny living room was cleared of furniture and in its place a platform filled the entire space. Her father would spend Christmas Eve and into the early morning hours constructing a miniature town with a train running through it. No one was allowed to enter before Christmas morning. Later that day friends and neighbors would flock to their home to see his beloved creation. Sadly she didn't know what eventually happened to that magical collection. Years later her parents loved to visit our small New England town and it only occurs to me now that perhaps, in part, it was because it resembled that long ago idyll.

This suddenly calls to mind the lovely three-dimensional showpieces my father created in our picture window for the Christmas season. Like a Mexican retablo they featured a painted background with figures and artifacts in front of the scene creating a diorama effect. Stars twinkled through the tiny pinholes Dad had meticulously scattered across the diminutive night sky. Like the tiny village my mother remembered, my father's craftsmanship also stopped and delighted anyone passing by, and I was enthralled by his talent and imagination.

Meanwhile I spent my own adult Christmas seasons in pursuit of the perfect "real" tree, often enlisting (read: roped) friends in the search. As my collection of ornaments grew so did the size of the trees to accomodate them all. Yet ultimately I began to tire of my own annual ritual: frigid treks between Christmas tree lots, sawing and hacking the trunk down to size, dragging those green behemoths up a flight of stairs spraying needles everywhere, and watching my prize slowly relax and spread until it had engulfed the room displacing furniture and every other function. For a few short weeks I would ignore the loathsome task of dismantling it all at the end of the holidays -- the price to pay for being the "Charlie Browniest" hold-out for authenticity and a once sweet tradition.

Simultaneously I'd watched my folks scale back each year to smaller trees and simpler decorations until, without really noticing, I fell into the habit of taking my folks' faux trees as they pared down over time. Initially I simply let their 4-footer languish in a box in my attic. I would never use it myself, but... Then one day nearly fifteen years ago, I curiously slid it out of its cardboard sarcophagus, fluffed out the squashed branches and gave it a try. Charlie himself would have proclaimed that it wasn't "such a bad little tree."

I shared with friends that it seemed as though as I had matured -- becoming more real -- it became less important to have a real Christmas fir or the perfect tree. I'd like to think that I had become generally more tolerant of imperfection, but that might be a stretch. The real turning point was the year that I purchased what turned out to be my last real tree and was so busy that I never decorated it. So with a concession to smaller being better (for me), I began to divest myself of the many ornaments and decorations that had turned from blessing to burden.

Since then I've made gifts of my collection, carefully selecting ones suited to certain colleagues and friends. I donated many to a battered women's shelter for their own season of hope. Then when I moved a couple of years ago, I kept only those few ornaments which I truly love and that have meaning for me. It is those that I put on my tree last week. What resulted is a luminous sparkly tiny tree that was my mother's last and which now sits on my childhood drop-front desk. I blended some of her ornaments with my own and surrounded it with framed family photos. My grandparents, my mom and dad as children, my father back in the 40's looking jaunty with his pipe, and a happy snapshot of my mom with her sister who died only two days after she did this summer -- all look back at me and make me smile.

This is my holiday ritual this year reflecting the changed landscape of my life. No trains, no painted panorama, no curious passers-by. This is for myself. Who knows what I'll do next year, but right now this meets my need and quiet desire to honor and remember those I've loved and who live on in my memory -- and my heart. It's beautiful.