A Christmas Story

  It's Christmas at my house again. Putting up the tree denotes that Christmas has arrived.  It's a little early for Christmas. Early enough that I know that the Christmas Muzac in the stores will most likely drive me batshit crazy by the time the big day rolls around. It's better these days, I used to work in retail, department store management to be exact. The Christmas tunes began in our store immediately after Halloween. It was a special kind of torture to spend 12 hours a day hearing Silent Night played in a popular style, only to be exceeded once I had left retail, by the guy who occupied the office next to me who began singing Christmas Carols acapella  October 1st. I'd hate to have been brought up in a non-Christian tradition, there is no escape.  Though "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" is probably an equal opportunity offender.

  The tree is up earlier than I would have liked. I prefer to put it up in the middle of  December since I like real-deal trees, authentic, once home to squirrels and birds, evergreen, piney-smelly trees. And, if you put authentic trees up in your living room too early, by the time Christmas Day comes along, the real tree option can drop sharp brown pine needles all over the living room. When you step on them, they hurt.

  In any case, I had help this past weekend. My daughter and her significant other were home for Thanksgiving (an also-ran holiday that has little commercial application being sandwiched between Christmas and Halloween) and we went hunting Christmas trees while I had helpers to get the tree up and trimmed.

  When I was a kid we never put the tree up early. We scoffed at those who did. On the weekend after Thanksgiving we drove out to the Christmas Tree Farm and wandered through the woods looking at all the available, still attached to their roots trees, selected one, anointed it with a red tag with our name on it, and then returned to cut it down at a later date.  The date was close to Christmas.  Because my sibs and myself were such a lively bunch, we never decorated the tree until a day or two before Christmas once the anticipation was driving our parents out of their ever-loving minds and were ready to commit murder.  So this early get the tree up is a bit alien to me.

  I have lots of ornaments. I have the ones I have collected myself, the ones that I inherited from my mother -- these are the ones that I grew up with, still stored in the cardboard wine and beer boxes that my family kept them in since the 1960's. I also have ornaments I collected for my kids. I began buying an ornament each year beginning the year of their births. This stash of ornaments is destined to go to each of them when they have a home large enough to erect a Christmas tree.  In the meantime, they have been hung on the family tree in my living room.


  I have all these ornaments. These days more ornaments than can comfortably fit on a tree that can comfortably fit into my living room. No vaulted ceiling for me. My house was built in 1960 with an eight foot ceiling.  So there are size limitations on the tree,

  This year was different. This year, my youngest bought a home in Tennessee with her new husband. This means, I decided, that they will want to buy and decorate their own tree, which means that it was time to divest myself of some of the ornaments.  To be precise, the ones I have been collecting for my daughter all these years,

  My older daughter was the one who actually went through and made the selections, It's probably for the best that I wasn't the one pulling them out of the boxes this last time. Twenty-six Christmas seasons; these ornaments represent the last twenty-six holidays that I have had the joy of this youngest daughter.  Had I been going through those boxes, each ornament would have sent me on a lengthy trip down memory lane. No doubt it would have taken me twenty-six years to get them boxed up as I was wallowing in Christmas past.  But they were pulled, sorted, boxed, and sent.  They arrived in Nashville yesterday.

  If you look at the picture, you will see that my tree still looks pretty full. It looks like I have plenty of ornaments. There's a reason for that.

  I didn't send her all her ornaments. I kept some. Yeah. I did that,