To amuse myself, I counted the ornaments as I took them off the Christmas tree on New Year’s Day. One hundred sixty-five. Five weeks earlier, I had carefully hung the same one hundred sixty-five. Having quantified a vaguely uneasy sense of hours lost to unwrapping tissue, climbing up and down a stepladder, and periodically leaning back to squint and assess my progress, I now knew the scope of my Christmas tree fixation. I felt like a person who, out of mild curiosity, does a little math and realizes her daily coffee habit will lead to bankruptcy. I wondered if I should have spent those hours, year after year after year, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, and clothing the naked—or at least doing the laundry and shoveling the walk.
When my mother was about the age I am now, she finally carried through with her annual threat to not decorate a Christmas tree. “No. Nope. I am not going to have a tree this year.” Truth be told, my dad was the one who always loved the Christmas tree. I remember when I was a very young child we crawled under the tree, lay on our backs, and looked up through the lit and decorated branches. “Isn’t it pretty, Jenny?” But as much as my dad enjoyed the tree (from any angle), once the lights were strung, the hanging of ornaments fell to my mother. I guess she found the process tedious, and eventually not worth her while.
Mind you, we children were all grown and out of the house when she freed herself from the shackles of tree decorating. She had done her duty. I don’t mean to imply that my brothers and I were deprived of an essential element of December in America. But I remember feeling sad when she abandoned the Christmas tree tradition.
I began to wrap my ornaments, and nestle each into its corrugated compartment.
You wouldn’t even notice the short string of alternating beads and colored felt squares on my tree; I strung them in pre-school when we lived in LaCrosse. The cluster of small knit bells are the result of the time my grandma tried to teach me to knit. The lesson didn’t take, but I hang the bells each Christmas. A folk art, singing monk tucks into a small, red Marshall Fields box. Inside the lid, a gift receipt from 1971 is taped. I suppose my mom had accompanied my dad into the city that December for his meetings, and shopped for Christmas gifts in the grand department store on State Street until they met up again for dinner.
On the underside of a jolly Santa is written “Baum’s 1976.” That’s how I know, for sure, that I received this ornament one of the Christmases I worked as a retail clerk in my hometown’s most exclusive department store. Baum’s sold women’s clothing and lingerie, costume jewelry, the Estée Lauder line of cosmetics (that was a big deal), sheets, towels and housewares. (All the brides in Morris registered at Baum’s.) I learned to assist customers, make change, and wrap gifts.
There’s a Snoopy ornament from a college sorority Secret Santa exchange. December at the sorority house was a frantic balancing act. We were supposed to be festive and study for finals at the same time. The tiny Dutch wooden shoes? Those are from my tour through Europe with my childhood friend. Seventeen countries in thirty-one days for a cost of two thousand dollars—airfare included! We were nineteen. What an adventure.
A series of ornaments each represent unique features of Crystal Lake, the town where we’ve made a home for more than three decades. There’s the sledding hill, the historic theater, the original high school, the Main Beach house, among others. My husband gave me one every year that the Downtown Merchants Association sold them for a community fundraiser. My mother-in-law cross-stitched dozens of ornaments for us. Every Christmas she would make an ornament for each of her progeny. Imagine the hours she spent thinking about her children and grandchildren…
The snowman is from my youngest son’s second-grade teacher; I volunteered in her class that year. The carolers-in-the-doorway is a gift from one of the children in the church choir, which I directed for many years. How excited those children were each Christmas, as they donned their shepherd robes and wriggled and squirmed until they could sing their song in the Christmas pageant. The cascading star ornament is from the boys’ first babysitter. Three stars. One for each boy.
Amal made the felt camel, hand sewn with beaded adornments. She and her surviving children fled to Jordan from Syria in 2013, after her husband and a son were killed and their business destroyed. In 2016 the family arrived in Chicago as refugees, and my church sponsored them. She stitched the camel ornaments to earn a little money. Just last month, she and the children were sworn in as citizens of the United States. I feel the sting of tears as I slip the little camel into a small bag.
I have a lacy snowflake ornament, cut on a huge laser. My husband’s manufacturing business bought that massive machine about ten years before he sold the business and retired. The laser could precision cut specialty parts for the thousands of display racks manufactured annually. It could also cut a snowflake. We were so fortunate to own that business and make a living for our family and all the families who worked there.
The delicate hummingbird was a gift from our daughter-in-law’s mother. She traveled from the east coast to our home when a bridal shower was given for our middle son’s fiancée—the first of three beautiful daughters-in-law.
Two ornaments remain. The silver-grey, glittered papier-mâché bird hung on my parents’ first Christmas tree in their married-student apartment in Ames, years before I was born. And this year, my infant granddaughter allowed her tiny foot to be pressed into soft clay, preserving her footprint for next year’s Christmas tree.
For I have decided I will decorate the tree again next year.
In the 18th century, the great English literary figure, Samuel Johnson, said, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life…” Can the same claim be made for decorating the Christmas tree? May it be many years before I am tired of decorating the Christmas tree. I don’t want to be tired of life.
