My wife and I are hosting Christmas this year, and we’re thrilled and excited to do so. As many as 14 friends and family members will join us for dinner, the largest number in many a moon. When we were first married, we had to rent a banquet table and chairs to accommodate all our guests, which included many older relatives, who would be squeezed into the dining room, living room and kitchen. These days, we can pretty much seat everyone at the dining room table.
We are starting to decorate our tiny home for the holidays. I look forward to it. Each year, while sipping bourbon Manhattans and listening to a soundtrack of offbeat seasonal songs like The Kinks’ subversive “Father Christmas” and Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody,” I set up the Dickens Village pieces we started collecting on our honeymoon. I’ll do that on Sunday, after the Patriots game, and we’ll also put out a few beloved family heirlooms from our childhoods.
One thing you won’t see in our home is a Christmas tree. For a few years, we put up a white aluminum stick tree with lights attached that served as a perfect place to show off our special ornaments. But a real tree? Fuhgeddaboudit! I joke that my wife and I have enjoyed 33 years of married bliss because we don’t go through the annual ritual of selecting and decorating a hand-picked spruce.
In the early ’80s, while we were dating, I got the boneheaded idea to set up a tree in my third-floor Marblehead apartment and sought her help. Let’s just say, it didn’t turn out to be the festive, memory-building funfest I envisioned. It was actually a Christmas miracle that our relationship survived the ordeal. Three years of hopes and dreams were nearly destroyed in mere minutes.
We found a beautiful tree at the Boy Scouts stand on Lafayette Street near the Church of St. Andrew. After haggling with the scout leader, proving that my credit was good and settling on a monthly payment amount, we tossed the evergreen into the trunk of my old Ford.
After lugging the tree up four flights of stairs, getting sticky sap all over my clothes, and hunting high and low for my box of “Xmas junk,” we were ready to make Christmas memories.
She held the tree while I fidgeted with the rusty screws on the red-and-green tree stand. With bleeding fingers, I twisted those screws into the base of the tree.
“Is it straight?” I cooed. “How can I tell. I’m standing right next to you, my love,” she replied.
We stepped back to take a peek. It was not straight. We went through the screw-tightening ritual again … and again … and again. Finally, it was reasonably straight.
Patience might be a virtue, but ours was running mighty thin. I was ready for an extended stay at the Happy Goat Sanitarium.
“Let me sweep up all these pine needles, before we decorate the thing,” she said, grabbing a broom. While she did that, I untangled the string of lights. It actually lit up. But once upon the tree, the lights stayed dark. No matter what I did, the lights stayed dark, and I was frequently taking the name of the Lord in vain and threatening to toss the tree out the window.
“Will you behave like an adult!” she screamed. Frustrated, I threw the lights to the floor, and they shined brightly. Yay!
I went to powder my nose and returned to see an awful gold strand tossed on the tree. “What’s that hideous thing?” I snarled. “Garland! Looks great, doesn’t it,” she said, smiling.
“No. It looks cheap. Tinsel is better.”
“Tinsel. I hate tinsel,” she snapped. “You’ll be cleaning the apartment in August and that shredded Reynolds Wrap will still be all over the place.”
I ripped the garland off the tree. She puffed furiously on a cigarette.
The ornaments were applied with minimum difficulty, although I further ruffled feathers by moving some she had placed on the tree.
Before long, the tree looked beautiful. We were both smiling now. While we hugged, with my back to the tree, she suddenly screamed. “BILL! THE TREE!”
Our beautiful, gorgeous, fully-decorated, first tree together was on the floor. Shrapnel from glass ornaments littered the floor. Candy canes had shattered into hundreds of pieces.
Five hours later, the tree was upright and the lights were working.
“It’s a lovely tree. We’ll laugh about this years from now,” I said, collapsing onto the couch.
She was not laughing. “Bill, I’m worried we’ll go through this every year. I love you very much, but I hate tinsel. You move the ornaments I put on the tree …”
“You had three red ones side-by-side.”
After we bought the house we still live in, we actually decorated trees for a few years. Believe it or not, one year we even went to a tree farm and cut our own fir. We eventually decided the stress and frustrations weren’t worth the effort.
Thus, the Brotherton manse will be tree-free again this year. This is one family tree we can do without.
