Deconstructing the Tree

Happy New Year, possums!

No, wait - that's Dame Edna, not me.  In any event - it's 2015, so let's agree to make the best of it.

I am reluctantly getting it in gear and taking down all the festive holiday sparklies - reluctantly, for the twofold reasons of sloth and that fact the sparklies sort of cheer you up whenever you look at them (until it's around April, at which point you stop feeling cheerful every time you look at the dry, dry needles on and under the tree and start feeling badly about yourself for being a slovenly person who harbors unnecessary fire hazards in the living room.)

In point of fact, the tree is already what my Hamburg-born Dad would describe, when displeased with the quality of the luncheon meat, in his delightful Plattdeutscher idiom as "trocken wie 'n Katzen's Arsch" - an untranslatable and somewhat unprintable phrase that used to elicit shrieks of "Heinz! Sei doch nicht so ordinair!" (which I am more than happy to translate as meaning"Don't be so vulgar!") from my mother.  She, more gently bred, attained her maturity on a small farm in a tiny village north of Lübeck, where, it seems, the aridity of liverwurst somewhat past its prime was not described by comparing it with feline posteriors.  Naturally, I learned considerably more colloquial German from Papi than I did from Mutti, a circumstance that once led my paternal grandmother to burst into hysterical tears and a perfect torrent of remonstration and lament after I'd amiably advised her, in my very best Plattdeutsch, to open up a can of whup-ass on my brother, and, upon being questioned as to who on Earth had taught me such a nasty phrase, had jerked a thumb towards my progenitor and retorted, ungrammatically but truthfully, "Him."

Where was I?  Yes - the tree.

It is a large tree, and a beautiful tree.  It is covered with delicate glass tchotchkes, which I have been collecting ever since my son was born. Today happens to be his nineteenth birthday, so there you go - that's a lot of years, and there are lots and lots of little glass hummingbirds, ceramic dogs that we imagine vaguely resemble dogs we have owned in the past, and blown-glass globes that look like varicolored soap bubbles.

The fact that it's my son's birthday reminds me that the Christmas tree was instrumental in procuring his presence onto the planet in the first place.  The fact is - and I'm not proud of this - I had baby fever, but my then-husband (now my former husband) did not.  Well, these things happen, and a woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do, so I flatly refused to have a Christmas tree in the house until we had a child to share the holiday with.  It was scummy emotional blackmail at its finest, and I'm not proud of it, as I say, but - Well, actually, that's a lie.  I'm very proud of it.  It was a brilliant move on my part, and it got me my kid.  Happy birthday, Caleb!  There are no depths to which I will not stoop for your sake!  (Several Gentle Readers are now shaking their heads and murmuring, "No wonder she's divorced.")

There have been several years (notably high school years) when my son was Too Cool to evince any interest in Christmas, other than to disdainfully rip open his packages, sigh, and return to his room with a general air of discontent and ennui.  These were trying years, dear Gentle Reader, and I wondered whether I should just say "To hell with it" and donate everything to the Franciscan Thrift Shop on 96th Street, rather than schlep it all up to Rockland County when we moved last June - particularly since the man to whom I am now married is Jewish and regards all Christmas-related bling with gently ironic head-shake and a sotto voce "Oy...goyishe kitsch."

But I once read in dear Judith Martin's Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children that, if one perseveres through the years of eye-rolling and contumely, the day will come when the festive season rolls around and you resignedly suggest omitting the items that once provoked the worst of the groaning, only to be met with cries of, "What?! We can't not have the Advent calendars with the little pieces of bad chocolate that taste like 95-year-old cardboard! That's my favorite part!"  And, Miss Manners goes on to assure her Gentle Readers, when that day comes, you will know that you have succeeded in Creating a Tradition.

So this was the year that my son, now a college freshman (and thus, by definition, so intrinsically cool that he no longer needs to prove that he is cool) moseyed into the living room (well after his stepfather and I had done all the grunt-work of getting the tree inside and up the stairs, pounding it onto the stand, and stringing the miles and miles of lights) as I was unpacking the boxes of ornaments, helped himself to one of his grandmother's special holiday cookies, and inquired nonchalantly, "Hey, Ma...setting up the tree? Why didn't you call me?"

Stunned, I stammered something about not wanting to bother him for so frivolous an activity as tree ornamentation while he was busy writing papers on such weighty subjects as Anachronism In the Depiction of the Ancient World in Modern Film.  To which act of maternal deference he replied, with an apparent sincerity that nearly sent me into a swoon under the tree, "Are you kidding?  I wouldn't miss it!"

We then spent a splendid 45 minutes unwrapping everything from swathings of tissue paper, commenting on when and where each article had been acquired, making the red-coated wooden soldier with "New Brunswick, Nova Scotia" inscribed on the back do jumping jacks by pulling on the string, debating the particular placement of each crystal ornament for its maximal sparkle potential against the lights, greeting the emergence of each favorite trinket with cries of, "Oh, I totally forgot we had this one!" and at last being presented by my son with the little red,white, and green bookworm in the striped stocking cap and the words, "This one is yours, Mom. Where do you want to put him?"

"Her, not him," I said, and hung the bookworm up next to the little needlepoint birdhouse with the real birdseed inside that a very dear relative-by-courtesy had once made for us.

At last we stood back, squinted at our work with a critical eye, and pronounced it good.

"We're finished!" I caroled to my husband, who was playing chess on his laptop and trying to ignore what was going on in the living room.

"Great, great," he replied, with a perfectly unconvincing semblance of enthusiasm and nary a glance away from the screen. "Looks amazing.  You guys wanna go out for Chinese?"

There are traditions and traditions.  Lo and behold - Miss Manners was right.  Christmas trees and Chinese take-out...holiday fusion at its best.