Tree Task

A week after Christmas, I finally took down the tree. And the ornaments, decorations and lights. I sighed the sigh of a thousand sighs and wondered, once again, how to bring the joy back to this task. I’m pretty sure I enjoyed putting it all up-- the tree, the lights, the decorations- but it all seems so long ago, December. Christmas is a little like childbirth for me. I forget all about the labor once it’s over and then by the time is comes around again I’m looking forward to it like a blitheful bride. And then, neck deep in the frenzy, I remember.

I wonder if it’s really the task of unhooking and wrapping, folding and storing that tugs at me, or the churning in my head. If it were solely meditative, my head would be empty; free to lovingly tuck in the little ornaments like dolls into their sleeping bags of tissue paper worn soft by years of use; and then into plastic crates; their lids snapped shut with finality. But my head is crowded; each ornament means too much. Some are sweet; like the Japanese paper cranes swiped at the end of a friend’s wedding to a Japanese girl. Her mother had lovingly folded hundreds of paper cranes to give as gifts to departing guests, but they had left them on the tables when they took their purses to go, so I rounded them up and now place them on my tree, red and silver; as symbols of love’s hope and a mother’s graceful diligence. My mother took apart the wooden crib mobile my sisters and I shared as infants and gave each of us an ornament of a little wooden child happily astride a circus animal. I still have the ornaments I made in girl scouts, cookie cut from a mixture of flour and salt, and painted gold; my maiden name on the back. I picked three starfish off the beach one summer years ago and aired them out on the back porch in the sun and rain for a month. They, too, get hung on the tree with a simple wire hook.

But also hanging, gently clanging up against miniature colored light bulbs, are the ornaments from my marriage; the ones he didn’t take; the ones too pretty to toss. Beautiful tertiary-colored Christmas balls on sale from the Moma gift store years ago dangle near the ornaments culled from various vacations; when an ornament and an unusual kitchen utensil were all we’d budget for as souvenirs. I still hang the paper ornaments-- cut out and single hole-punched for hooks-- from clever Christmas card graphics that I hung all around the bottom three feet of the tree when my son and his toddler buddies were prone to grabbing and eating whatever they could reach. Coiling the chili pepper lights reminds me once again of my Dad who’s since died. Growing up, his signature tree move was to put one strand of some non-holiday lights around the lower extremities of our tree. He got a huge kick out of the glowing pink flamingos or red hot chili peppers that alternated as they broke then were happily replaced. They served to remind us not to take ourselves, our tree-- or the holiday, I suppose—too seriously; which worked, because my tree continues his tradition of low grade rococo whimsy to this day.

Those chapters are long since over now but I’m reminded of them every year as I dutifully unwrap the treasures that archive my past. I like having a tree in my house for a few weeks, I really do, and I’m sad to see it go. I love the smell and the twinkling lights; the hugeness of this giant looming thing in my living room; an invited guest, mute and still. I enjoy the tree’s invitation to be creative, daring me to slap a hook on something and hang it up in the name of festive. I like that it shakes things up.

Once our tree is returned to its former self, we thank it for joining us in our home; appreciative for its sacrifice and service; a vertical document of a life lived fully and like it’s annual bearer, still growing. Then we drag it out onto the curb where we lay it to rest and head inside to vacuum; looking forward to the needles we’ll uncover in June, like an off-season beachcomber who doesn’t shake out her shoes too well, on purpose.