I don’t know how your Christmas memory registers but mine feels pretty illuminated most times. Now...whether this illumination is light being shed, based on data stored in my brain cells or a product of my imagination, I don’t know. Wherever these memories come from, they do feed my soul and add new dimensions to my story.
It wasn’t until I was nine or ten years old that I realized that our Christmas Tree was something that came—from somewhere. Up to that point, I guessed it arrived, somehow, and landed in our living/family room so we could admire it. As I grew older I was allowed to put stuff on it—but very carefully and according to specific rituals that were, while unwritten, most stringent. The chief one among these was setting the tinsel on the branches one strand at a time...
Christmas must have been a particular financial struggle for my parents in the early sixties because at that time that the pattern of trees appearing and such was broken. Little did they know that this broken-ness would become, for me, part of the truth of Christmas.
Since we could not afford a Christmas Tree, but could not do without one, it was close to midnight on Christmas Eve when we left the house looking for a lonely (and closed) Christmas Tree Lot. The reasoning was that these trees would be thrown onto the fire once the next day had past so why not give at least one of them a good home. We stayed up for a large part of the night hauling, setting up, wiring branches into blank spots, lighting and decorating—while listening to Dickens: A CHRISTMAS CAROL, on the radio. When our sisters came into the family room on Christmas morning, the transformation was complete—impacting and memorable.
I am not certain how many times we performed the—Santa Claus brought the tree on Christmas Eve trick—but at least once more, to my memory...
Cut to:
Me/us starting our own Christmas traditions. No midnight raid of Christmas Tree Lots—but there was a lot of careful selection involved in finding the “perfect” Christmas Tree. Size, shape, form. Not certain where that pattern came from—I have a few ideas— but that is a different story...
Then, somehow, a few years ago my bride and I decided that—any tree would do. Once we brought it home and loved it—this tree was a part of our Christmas and it would become “...the best tree we ever had.” This revised attitude made buying a tree a lot less of an event but much more freeing at the same time.
We are now at the point where we don’t even stop to untie the bundled up tree—we just grab and go. The surprise of what it’s going to look like has become part of the event and tradition.
Somewhere in the midst of all these personal changes—Christmas Tree producers have started growing ‘plantation pines’. These are actually Christmas bushes. Plants that have been trimmed to look like a perfectly shaped Christmas tree. So now, we go to a tree lot and there they are—everything a well informed shopper could want—thick and full and green (but fake). Feels familiar, somehow.
I don’t remember how or exactly when this next bit happened but a time came when we decided that having a bound up and trimmed Christmas Tree (nee bush) was not necessarily the right idea. It was at that point that we began our campaign to ‘free’ our Christmas Tree...
So now a tree is picked up and brought home, still wrapped up in the string the tree farmer put around it in Oregon. It is taken to the garage, a portion cut off the bottom and then put into our tree stand. At that time the string wrapping comes off. This latest, temporary, addition to our family is then hauled into the living room and placed. The next task is to free our tree...
Since its inception this tree has been forced to grow a certain way, to satisfy consumers. So, I reasoned, why not set it free! Reaching into the tree I pull out the branches closest to the trunk and let them go—back to the way they want to grow. There they are, these beautiful cowlicks, emerging into the light of day—these asymmetrical appendages, sticking out of the tree, here and there, at all kinds of angles, odd and ugly and supremely beautiful. These branches, that had been forced to be one way, to please some consumer, are now permitted to become the limb they were created to be. And so—my hands continue to pull, twist, bend and release.
It seemed fitting that this year—the year of the novel—in my new story, I found that I was looking at this ‘bend and release’ process in an entirely different light.
Here I was, a writer—releasing characters limbs, working to let them become who they were created to be—not something I had forced them into...but their own selves. If they are to become real they must ‘be’—not be ‘like’...
“We should always be what we want to seem.” (favorite Mary Renault - Sophocles...)
As I continue to think about this process I realize that I can easily apply these freeing feelings to myself. As an individual who has been released to become the me I was created to be and not just an image of what some ‘trimmer’ clipped me into...
Not certain how well I am communicating my thoughts but I must say that these ponderings have been meaningful to me.
So, today, I give thanks for the freedom to become and be—create and celebrate—the gift of Christmas.
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It wasn’t until I was nine or ten years old that I realized that our Christmas Tree was something that came—from somewhere. Up to that point, I guessed it arrived, somehow, and landed in our living/family room so we could admire it. As I grew older I was allowed to put stuff on it—but very carefully and according to specific rituals that were, while unwritten, most stringent. The chief one among these was setting the tinsel on the branches one strand at a time...
Christmas must have been a particular financial struggle for my parents in the early sixties because at that time that the pattern of trees appearing and such was broken. Little did they know that this broken-ness would become, for me, part of the truth of Christmas.
Since we could not afford a Christmas Tree, but could not do without one, it was close to midnight on Christmas Eve when we left the house looking for a lonely (and closed) Christmas Tree Lot. The reasoning was that these trees would be thrown onto the fire once the next day had past so why not give at least one of them a good home. We stayed up for a large part of the night hauling, setting up, wiring branches into blank spots, lighting and decorating—while listening to Dickens: A CHRISTMAS CAROL, on the radio. When our sisters came into the family room on Christmas morning, the transformation was complete—impacting and memorable.
I am not certain how many times we performed the—Santa Claus brought the tree on Christmas Eve trick—but at least once more, to my memory...
Cut to:
Me/us starting our own Christmas traditions. No midnight raid of Christmas Tree Lots—but there was a lot of careful selection involved in finding the “perfect” Christmas Tree. Size, shape, form. Not certain where that pattern came from—I have a few ideas— but that is a different story...
Then, somehow, a few years ago my bride and I decided that—any tree would do. Once we brought it home and loved it—this tree was a part of our Christmas and it would become “...the best tree we ever had.” This revised attitude made buying a tree a lot less of an event but much more freeing at the same time.
We are now at the point where we don’t even stop to untie the bundled up tree—we just grab and go. The surprise of what it’s going to look like has become part of the event and tradition.
Somewhere in the midst of all these personal changes—Christmas Tree producers have started growing ‘plantation pines’. These are actually Christmas bushes. Plants that have been trimmed to look like a perfectly shaped Christmas tree. So now, we go to a tree lot and there they are—everything a well informed shopper could want—thick and full and green (but fake). Feels familiar, somehow.
I don’t remember how or exactly when this next bit happened but a time came when we decided that having a bound up and trimmed Christmas Tree (nee bush) was not necessarily the right idea. It was at that point that we began our campaign to ‘free’ our Christmas Tree...
So now a tree is picked up and brought home, still wrapped up in the string the tree farmer put around it in Oregon. It is taken to the garage, a portion cut off the bottom and then put into our tree stand. At that time the string wrapping comes off. This latest, temporary, addition to our family is then hauled into the living room and placed. The next task is to free our tree...
Since its inception this tree has been forced to grow a certain way, to satisfy consumers. So, I reasoned, why not set it free! Reaching into the tree I pull out the branches closest to the trunk and let them go—back to the way they want to grow. There they are, these beautiful cowlicks, emerging into the light of day—these asymmetrical appendages, sticking out of the tree, here and there, at all kinds of angles, odd and ugly and supremely beautiful. These branches, that had been forced to be one way, to please some consumer, are now permitted to become the limb they were created to be. And so—my hands continue to pull, twist, bend and release.
It seemed fitting that this year—the year of the novel—in my new story, I found that I was looking at this ‘bend and release’ process in an entirely different light.
Here I was, a writer—releasing characters limbs, working to let them become who they were created to be—not something I had forced them into...but their own selves. If they are to become real they must ‘be’—not be ‘like’...
“We should always be what we want to seem.” (favorite Mary Renault - Sophocles...)
As I continue to think about this process I realize that I can easily apply these freeing feelings to myself. As an individual who has been released to become the me I was created to be and not just an image of what some ‘trimmer’ clipped me into...
Not certain how well I am communicating my thoughts but I must say that these ponderings have been meaningful to me.
So, today, I give thanks for the freedom to become and be—create and celebrate—the gift of Christmas.
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