A Christmas story: The Pink Tree
I've seen a lot of adds this year about personal Christmas stories. This one is probably one of mine, written in an email to a friend of mine this morning as we commiserate about the stringent traditions that our family makes us go through. I'm reposting it here because I think it says a lot about my feelings on this Holiday.
It is eerie being the only one in a whole building on Christmas eve.
Technically, I'm supposed to be getting ready right now. I got a shower, packed my clothes, and am sitting here waiting to dry listening to the silent noise of snow falling down outside. Its cold. I'm staying in someone else's apartment, watching her cats.
It's strange, and completely unlike Christmas.
The worst thing is knowing that tonight, tomorrow morning, and tomorrow night, I have to sit quiet with a smile on my face, enduring the normal relative questions about how my year has gone and what I'm up to now. I know they won't remember my name, and I sure as hell don't remember theirs; my family consists of my grandma's seven siblings and all of their offspring and their offspring's offspring.. Nobody remembers anybody, anymore.
In another generation, they'll be just a myth, and I'll be old telling stories about the days when you actually knew who your cousins were and what their occupation was. Now, it just doesn't matter.
I think we all kind of want Christmas, secretly. The older folk, especially, want the fairy-tale so bad that they go through the motions and give these glares or these passive aggressive 'oh, it'll be alrights' when it really won't and they're telling your sister how much you don't love them enough to be home for Christmas this year. They're so desperate to achieve Christmas that Christmas lies in ruins around them, and they don't even know because they're still trying so hard to squint rose-colored christmas tree lights.
Our tree is pink.
It happened on accident three years ago, when I came home for Christmas to find the house a wreck and no tree up on Christmas eve. My grandmother had died the spring before, and my parents were going to visit relatives Christmas eve and had kept putting off hauling the tree out of the basement for far too long. I went down immediately to get it, only to find the basement in its usual disarray and the plastic tree-stand missing. The tree we'd had for 20 years since moving into the house I grew up in had finally seen its last holiday morning.
It is still down there. It probably will be there when my parents die.
But I still took my sister out that night to pick up the last plastic tree at Wal-Mart: It was white and claimed to have red lights attached, but the two of us could clearly see the moment that we turned it on.
The lights were pink.
Dutifully unwilling to give up on Christmas, I returned the green tree ornaments and exchanged them for maroon and brown ones, desperately trying to find anything that would match the hot-pink shade and succeeding in getting little glittery birds and some elegant balls that pulled it all together.
When Christmas was over, my parents put the tree in a trash bag and set it downstairs, still decorated, and now they pull it out each year. It kind of feels like Christmas, even if it illuminates the room in an unnatural fuchsia.
That is Christmas, maybe. Doing what needs to be done because its important to you, and because it matters to you: not because you're expected to do it. Finding a way to make things nice.
I think this season has grown too many expectations, and because of that we're all striving so damned hard to meet the expectations that we can't find the time anymore to go above and beyond them. You have to have a wreath. You have to have a tree. You have to be surrounded by family in front of the fireplace drinking egg-nog and singing Christmas carols.
But my favorite adult Christmas to this day is the one I got snowed in for up in Chicago, and was able to just lay out with my room-mate underneath the Christmas tree telling stories. They weren't stories about Christmas.
They were just things that made the evening fun.
You know, after all that, I'm reminded of another story.
When I was little I loved the color pink, so my mom would get me to sit still on long car rides by telling me that, somewhere out there in the world, there existed a pink tree. I spent so damned long searching for that tree.
Who knew you could buy it at wal-mart?
It is eerie being the only one in a whole building on Christmas eve.
Technically, I'm supposed to be getting ready right now. I got a shower, packed my clothes, and am sitting here waiting to dry listening to the silent noise of snow falling down outside. Its cold. I'm staying in someone else's apartment, watching her cats.
It's strange, and completely unlike Christmas.
The worst thing is knowing that tonight, tomorrow morning, and tomorrow night, I have to sit quiet with a smile on my face, enduring the normal relative questions about how my year has gone and what I'm up to now. I know they won't remember my name, and I sure as hell don't remember theirs; my family consists of my grandma's seven siblings and all of their offspring and their offspring's offspring.. Nobody remembers anybody, anymore.
In another generation, they'll be just a myth, and I'll be old telling stories about the days when you actually knew who your cousins were and what their occupation was. Now, it just doesn't matter.
I think we all kind of want Christmas, secretly. The older folk, especially, want the fairy-tale so bad that they go through the motions and give these glares or these passive aggressive 'oh, it'll be alrights' when it really won't and they're telling your sister how much you don't love them enough to be home for Christmas this year. They're so desperate to achieve Christmas that Christmas lies in ruins around them, and they don't even know because they're still trying so hard to squint rose-colored christmas tree lights.
Our tree is pink.
It happened on accident three years ago, when I came home for Christmas to find the house a wreck and no tree up on Christmas eve. My grandmother had died the spring before, and my parents were going to visit relatives Christmas eve and had kept putting off hauling the tree out of the basement for far too long. I went down immediately to get it, only to find the basement in its usual disarray and the plastic tree-stand missing. The tree we'd had for 20 years since moving into the house I grew up in had finally seen its last holiday morning.
It is still down there. It probably will be there when my parents die.
But I still took my sister out that night to pick up the last plastic tree at Wal-Mart: It was white and claimed to have red lights attached, but the two of us could clearly see the moment that we turned it on.
The lights were pink.
Dutifully unwilling to give up on Christmas, I returned the green tree ornaments and exchanged them for maroon and brown ones, desperately trying to find anything that would match the hot-pink shade and succeeding in getting little glittery birds and some elegant balls that pulled it all together.
When Christmas was over, my parents put the tree in a trash bag and set it downstairs, still decorated, and now they pull it out each year. It kind of feels like Christmas, even if it illuminates the room in an unnatural fuchsia.
That is Christmas, maybe. Doing what needs to be done because its important to you, and because it matters to you: not because you're expected to do it. Finding a way to make things nice.
I think this season has grown too many expectations, and because of that we're all striving so damned hard to meet the expectations that we can't find the time anymore to go above and beyond them. You have to have a wreath. You have to have a tree. You have to be surrounded by family in front of the fireplace drinking egg-nog and singing Christmas carols.
But my favorite adult Christmas to this day is the one I got snowed in for up in Chicago, and was able to just lay out with my room-mate underneath the Christmas tree telling stories. They weren't stories about Christmas.
They were just things that made the evening fun.
You know, after all that, I'm reminded of another story.
When I was little I loved the color pink, so my mom would get me to sit still on long car rides by telling me that, somewhere out there in the world, there existed a pink tree. I spent so damned long searching for that tree.
Who knew you could buy it at wal-mart?