Since childhood, I have sworn against artificial Christmas trees.
Nothing like the smell of pine in the house at holiday time, I'd say.
Nothing like the sight of needles fallen to the floor.
Nothing like a real tree.
Growing up, we usually cut ours down. My father with a saw in his hands, wandering a frozen, snow-covered field with my mother, my brother, and my two sisters in tow, in search of the perfect Scotch pine. For whatever reason, for people of Italian descent living in upstate New York, only a Scotch pine would do. No Balsam fir, no Douglas fir, no Virginia pine, no blue spruce. The tree had to be a Scotch pine.
My mother kept the tree decorations in a thin, narrow, red and white box, the Wonder Horse box. My parents gave me a riding horse, a Wonder Horse, as a present for my second Christmas. The Wonder Horse had long since disappeared by the time I started noticing the Scotch pine trees we put every year, but the box it came in remained. Tonight, my mother said she had only gotten rid of it three or four years ago; she didn't want to, she said, but it had disintegrated to the point of uselessness.
The Wonder Horse box housed three generations worth of decorations. Lights my Nana had bought before my Papa died in 1946; delicate glass balls my mother had bought at the local department store, W.T. Grant's, before she married my father; garlands and tinsel accumulated in the intervening years.
I remember her sliding the Wonder Horse box across the floor of the small living room of the small apartment in the J.S. Moore Homes as my father set the tree - always Scotch pine, and always with a crooked trunk that vexed him - into the old green and red stand. We'd open the box with glee, hurriedly pulling the decorations out.
And I remember, as yet another Christmas season wound down to a close, my mother pulling out the Wonder Horse box. I remember her undressing the tree and putting the decorations away with a melancholy look on her face, I remember her, one year when I was in high school, turning to me and saying, "I always feel sad taking the tree down, it makes me think of another year gone, it makes me wonder if I'll see the next one, it makes me think of my brother."
Her brother died young, in his early twenties.
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At some point in my early to mid teens, my mother decided that rather than use the old garlands in the Wonder Horse box, we would make new garlands by stringing popcorn together.
She mentioned this to my Nana yesterday.
My Nana is ninety-nine years old now. Her body is still strong, but her mind has left her, ravaged by senile dementia.
It's still sometimes hard for me to believe.
Nana has always been nothing if not a survivor. Tough, fierce, strong. She lived through the worst of what America had to offer during the Great Depression. Widowed with five children at the age of thirty-four. One of those five children died in his twenties, and I wasn't alive for that, but my mother and others have said that loss just about killed her.
But it didn't.
She soldiered on, and by the time she came into my consciousness, she was a gregarious, affectionate, loud, loving presence who rained down joy upon her grandchildren. She relished passing on family hisory and family culinary traditions. She told us stories about her her home in Italy, somewhere south of Naples, she told us stories about love and loss, and she made everything from scratch. I've never had pie crust, anywhere, that even got within an area code of hers. She taught me how to make pasta by hand, how to can tomatoes. She taught me how to keep going, in the face of immense loss.
&&&&
I called my mother this morning to make plans to take my three motherless children to some sort of "breakfast with Santa."
"How was Nana yesterday?" I asked.
She sighed.
"She didn't recognize me for the first ten minutes or so. She kept asking me who I was. But she was alright. She knew me after awhile. Did you tell the kids we're going to see Santa?"
"Not yet. No sense telling them until we're on our way, ya know?"
"Yeah."
Pregnant pause.
"What, ma?"
"I hope you're gonna put up the tree tonight."
"Yeah. I don't wanna, but I will. You all win. I give up. "
"Good. Yesterday I told Nana you would. And we started talking about old Christmases, and about how when you were kids she used to keep making popcorn for us to string together into tree garlands."
"Yeah. Little did we know."
"Yeah. She remembered, she did."
"Good."
"Ya know what she said to me, when I started talking about the popcorn?"
"What, ma?"
"She looked at me and said, 'I'm sorry, but I'm gonna have to cry now.' And I told her it was alright, and she cried."
&&&&
We went down to the "breakfast with Santa" around ten-thirty. Bailey, almost eleven now, seems to still want to believe, no matter what he's hearing in school, but this morning, he seemed more concerned with the all-you-could-eat the bacon on offer. He didn't want to talk to Santa. Riley, my three year old, seemed suspicious; he circled the Santa several times, gave him a few evil eyes, refused his entreaties. Evie, our five year old daughter, climbed right up onto him, though.
"What do you want for Christmas this year, little one?"
"A Christmas tree!" she answered. "A Christmas tree, with lights!"
&&&&
Seventeen years ago tonight, December 19th, 1992.
Me and Lauren, in a final showdown.
Friends for months, and then finally, falling in love with each other, neither able to admit it.
In a matter of hours, she would return home to England. I took her to a couple of parties, and then, around midnight, I talked her into coming up to Saratoga Springs with me. A warm night, for upstate New York in mid-December. Fog and drizzle and mist all around us. We wandered the streets of that town, sat on barstools, watched the drunks around us talk and fight. In one bar, as we sat idly, wondering if either of us felt what the other felt. She asked me, what was your best night of the year, what was your best night of 1992, sitting at the bar of a place called Gaffney's, what was your best night, she asked, besides tonight, of course, and we both laughed, unable to admit that that night had been the best night.
We wandered the streets, sat in some bars, drank some beers, played some darts, in one bar I serenaded her with "Summer Wind" as it blared out of the juke, and in another we laughed as two men, roughly our age, rolled like tumbleweeds out the door, embroiled in some sort of dispute.
We wandered the streets and at one point wound up at the arcade on Broadway, looking at advertisements for houses for sale, and the temptation to kiss her then and there nearly overwhelmed me, but I held my ground.
And I drove her home, all the way back down to Albany, and as I drove we listened to the radio, and I thought to myself, almost home, she's almost gone now, sit tight, it's early Sunday morning and she'll be gone Monday afternoon, sit tight.
I took her home, and we got there, and I asked to use her bathroom, and in there, I looked at myself in the mirror and said, sit tight, it's almost over, don't bother, just go home, let it be, but when I came out of there and said my goodbye, four-thirty in the morning, something came over me, and we let the truth out and we opened the door on the best fifteen years of our lives.
&&&&
I didn't put up a tree the first year, hell, it wasn't even a month after Lauren had died.
But I didn't put up a tree the second year, either, and I rather liked it that way, and I thought maybe I'd never put up another.
This year, I started catching flak.
You gotta put up a tree.
For the kids.
You might not want one, but they do.
I wasn't sure what to make of that line of thinking.
I figured, as the widower, I held all the rights, and the familial suggestions were no more than that: suggestions, readily ignored suggestions.
&&&&
I put up the tree, tonight.
An artificial tree.
Lord, I hate fake trees, but it's all I could do this time around.
I dig the green canvass bag out of storage, and dragged that fake tree out.
That fake tree hadn't seen the light of day since the Christmas of 2005. Lauren had talked me into it. We were in the middle of trying to sell our house, and she thought the fake tree made for a quicker and easier clean-up.
We sold that house way faster than we expected to, and we wound up with no place to live. Until my brother called, that is. Until my brother called and offered us a spot in the downstairs apartment (he and his wife and two children live upstairs).
We took it.
Figured it gave us space in our house search.
No need to rush.
&&&&
We planned on staying here for three to six months. But things changed.
And now here I am, in the place where my grandfather lived when he died, in the place where my uncle, my sister's brother, lived when he died, the place where Lauren lived when she died.
I put up the tree.
For the kids.
It's on now, as we speak; I just took another peek back at the lights.
They shine bright, the kids sleep, and I think of the generations, three of them, who have suffered grievous losses while living here.
Even more than two years gone, I feel wounded, cut.
My mother said they always put the tree up in that corner, over there by the door to the side porch.
A tree's there now. Against my will, perhaps, but there.
I think of my Nana, and of all the people who have sat here, staring at trees put up against their wills.
We put the Christmas trees up, whether we want to or not, we put up the trees and fight whatever fights we need to fight,
we fight,
because it's all we know how to do....