O Christmas Tree

Yesterday I performed a spoken word piece at a fundraiser at Hollywood United Methodist Church. I was one of six performers (five other writers and a musician) asked to tell stories of Christmases past. Here's mine:

(And if you'd like to see the You Tube video of the first four performances, including mine which starts around minute 31, click here.)

My birthday is in the middle of October but every year as a child (and frankly, into adulthood as well), growing up in Michigan I would wish for one thing on my birthday: snow.

It didn’t matter if it had been 65 degrees and sunny for the entire fall or that a hayride and bonfire was planned for my birthday party. I wanted snow. You know why? Because it signified to me that Christmas was near. (We won’t talk about the occasional May snowstorms that most sane people in Michigan cursed.)

Christmas.

The golden season. The time of year when no matter what goes wrong or what is happening in the world, all seems perfect. Perfectly jolly and happy and merry.

Christmas.

And nothing symbolizes the Christmas season to me more than the Christmas tree. The green (or white or pink or blue or whatever) fir that adorns living rooms and shopping malls and sweatshirts (the one I wore in middle school that lit up? that tree on that sweatshirt tells you a lot about my fascination with the tannenbaum and a little something about how many friends I had in middle school). And for me, it’s always been the tree that holds a very special place in my heart. Whether it’s the tree of boys (more on that later) or the first tree I bought or the trees I wear continually on my ears all season long.

My obsession with the Christmas tree probably began long before I can remember; at least that’s what we’ll say for the sake of this story. Every year on the day after Thanksgiving, my father would drag the tree out of its box in the basement and he’d set to assembling it. Now mind you, as I got older, I was a big help but as a youngster, I think I was probably hurting more than helping. He’d assemble the tree, swear at the lights that never ever worked, go to the local hardware, buy some more, and try again. This is one of my favorite parts of Christmas and one of things I miss most living 2000 miles away from my family.

Once the tree was up, the ornaments would be unpacked. And in my house, it’s not just a handful of pretty bulbs and some candy canes. There are no less than five television boxes (these are from back when televisions were the size of a Prius) that are full of hundreds of tiny boxes holding the treasures that adorn the tree. And each has a special meaning or memory. To this day I can close my eyes and picture my parents’ tree and my favorite ornaments and tell you if they’re in the right place or not (this is a bone of contention in my family and as my mother proudly told me on the phone a few weeks ago, she didn’t move one single ornament this year because she heard me lamenting in her head about this, most likely ‘sarcastic me’).

My tree fixation continued on throughout my childhood as I was cast in a church pageant one year as ---wait for it ---yep, A TREE! Now, I like to think this is because I love what the Christmas tree stands for and the important role trees played in the story of Christmas (they did, I swear, that part was just edited out of the Bible to save on printing costs) but more than likely it was because I was (and still am) a horrible actor who, gun to my head, couldn’t remember and recite my name and birthday on command.

So here I was, a tree. My parents made me this great sandwich board that I am sure is still in their garage somewhere and glued cut up pieces of garland to it. And I killed as one of the three trees that year. I’m sure I did… Yes, yes. Very sure.

Anyway, when I moved away from home for college I realized that it was time to start my own traditions. My second year at school I lived in a house with three other girls and three guys. Yep, that meant the girls had control of the house because we outnumbered the guys. So that year we got the employees in the physical plant to bring us a fake tree that wasn’t being used in the cafeteria and we set to decorating it. But we were poor, very poor, college students who had no decorations, no lights, nothing (little aside: one of the guys in the house was so poor he kept his car running by keeping it plugged in all winter. He literally ran an extension cord through a window in the living room out to a heater on his engine block and no, we never thought about silly things like the college’s electricity bill.) And because we were so poor, we did what any sensible young college girls wanting to celebrate the season of Jesus’ birth would do.

We made a tree of boys.

Yep. We spent hours combing through magazines and cutting out pictures. We printed photos off the Internet in the computer lab. And we made hangers out of paperclips. And let me tell you, our house was a very popular one that year. We’d come home from classes to find new pictures added every day. Some from other residents of the house, some from students who’d heard the tale of our tree and found their way over, the door always unlocked, and taken it upon themselves to add to our masterpiece. And before you think we were scary stalkers, the boys were all celebrities and it was all in good fun. (At least that’s what we told the guys in the house when they objected. And if I remember correctly, they eventually got in on the fun too.)

When I started grad school, I moved into an apartment with my sister, Angela, and a friend. Our first Christmas there was a bit more traditional. We put up an old tree my parents’ delivered to us and bought some lights. Then we set to crafting. We found ornament templates online and colored them then laminated them. We took the rings of Mason jar lids and wound ribbon around them. We used glitter glue to write our names on cheap stockings and we spent hours studying around the tree. We didn’t need anything more.

But then when I moved to Arizona, Christmas lost some of its luster. It’s hard to get excited about the winter holiday season when it’s a 110 degrees outside. For the two years I lived in Arizona, there was no tree in my apartment. And for the first year here in Los Angeles, there wasn’t either. But then, I made a decision. I wanted my own Christmas tree. I wanted to start the season well before the day I’d make my way back to Michigan late in December each year. So Angela and I went to Walmart (I am sure Clark Griswold’s family wishes he’d known about Walmart back then) and found the perfect Christmas tree. And now we spend about an hour decorating and then several weeks sitting by it each night throughout the Christmas season.

So my obsession with Christmas trees is a long-standing one, and I’m okay with that. I have these awesome memories of staring at the lights night after night with family and friends (and if I don’t wear my glasses, the tree becomes this impressionist mosaic that’s really cool). I have these awesome memories of fighting over dead lights and broken icicles (you know, the glass kind, that break if you even sneeze in their direction; they adorn every inch of my parents tree and shards of glass cover the house for six months after the tree comes down and most of them are snapped in half). And I have these awesome memories of each and every tree that I have seen and worn and lovingly placed packages under.

I wore the tree pin on my shoe to the performance and my friend Pauley insisted on taking a picture of it!

And while I still have the tree pin I wore back in the ‘80s and I still wear the Christmas tree earrings my grandma gave me back in the ‘90s and I still have the first Christmas tree ornament I ever received (a mouse sleeping in a matchbox that was gifted to me at age two months by another two month old), the tree that I hold dearest and think most fondly of?

That tree of boys.

I mean really, if you can’t have George Clooney under your tree Christmas morning, the next best thing is to have him smiling at you from among the branches.

The storytellers: Chad Darnell, Jay Sowell, David Dean Bottrell, me, April Moore, and George Bellias