About Christmas Trees

Last night I felt another reason to look forward to Christmas in Paris other than to be spending it with Marina and my daughter. I called to tell her the time to expect me, not that she has to be there since I have a key to her cozy apartment near La Defense.

“I’ve decorated the tree with pictures of people I love,” she told me. Her adored niece is on the top.

I melted at the thought. Christmas trees to me are more important than the presents and have been since I was a little girl when Dar (my grandmother), my brother and I would set up the tree and take out the ornaments one by one. Some were from Dar’s childhood. My favorite was a thin opaque pink nest in gold mesh with a small bird perched on the edge. When I was 14, we opened the box to find pink shards, but the memory of that ornament is on every tree I’ve had since.

Memory has a lot to do with trees. I went through a stage where decorator trees (including a rather ghastly aluminum tree with blue bulbs) to my twenty-year old taste were sophisticated. That stage passed. Part of the desire to have decorator trees may have been in response to my first married Christmas in Germany when there was no money for decorations and I used chains of safety pins and my red hair curlers for decoration.

No tree can be decorated without memories of trees set up at Sam and Eva’s the Sunday before Christmas followed by Chinese take away, a meal repeated Christmas Eve. They hung plastic icicles that glowed when the living room lights went out.

When Llara was three she and I painted wooden ornaments cut into sleighs, people skating, presents, Santa, etc. She once told me that she felt I did it so much better than she did, but I treasure the clock and mouse with the blue paint outside the lines because I cannot look at it without seeing her sitting at my mother’s table in her lavender jumper and white turtleneck shirt and tights dipping her brush into the blue pot.

A tree at Wigglesworth Street isn’t really a tree without Susan’s Sputnik that she made in third grade, a rather gangrenous green ball with toothpicks. It’s not the beauty but the continuity. She would have ditched it long ago, but no one else will let her. “Where’s the Sputnik?” someone who wasn’t there for the decorating will invariably ask.

When I am in my home for Christmas I bring in a real tree preferably on the longest night, a symbol of the dying year and the year to come. To me that moment when the real tree enters my home is Christmas much more than the presents and the rest of the hoopla. It connects me with nature and the cycle of life. Years I am not there, I still bring in a bough before I leave. And as wonderful as the smells of baking cookies and other Christmas culinary delights are, the smell of real evergreen in the home for a short period renews every ion of my being for the coming year.

Tonight I will sleep in a tiny Parisian apartment of a good, good friend with a real tree decorated with pictures of her loved ones while I wait for my daughter. My Christmas will be complete on the 22nd of December because of that tree and its loving decorations. The rest is extra.