This is my first ever Christmas being more or less alone. I've somehow managed to outlive my immediate family which is quite an accomplishment since I nearly died four or five times in the eighties and nineties. I seriously considered not even putting up a tree this year. Why do it for just myself? It's a lot of work and with no one else around to see it, why waste the time?
Then on the Black Friday I finally decided to go ahead and put it up. It took maybe ten trips up and down the stairs to get everything down and collected in the living room. Then came the more tedious part of the project. I use a rotating tree stand that has a base with a lip around it. The first year I got it I put nothing under the stand and as the tree rotated that lip would sink through the carpet and padding until it made solid contact with the floor and this would result in the top of the tree moving in a wide circle and give the appearance the tree would topple at any time. (It never did, but it was unnerving to watch.) The very next year I invested in a large concrete paver to put under the stand and that solved the wobble problem but you still have to get the paver level and flat.
The tree we'd bought three years ago is all prelit and comes in three easy pieces, so putting it up is a snap. It lit up and was fine within minutes of getting the base level and true. Then came the branch fine tuning. Many had gotten compacted a bit in storage. A bit of fluffing and they were good to go. With the tree now up, lit and fluffed, it was time to start decorating. I tend to decorate my trees from the inside out using silver and highly reflective ornaments placed deep in the tree to catch the light and reflect it back out. These are some of my least impressive ornaments being little more than silver balls, or icicles.
Next came the glass beads and the first wave of memories. It's been a joke in our family pretty much forever that a very old string of glass beads we have ages a generation or two each time my dad would tell us how old they were. They started out as his parents beads, then a few years later they'd become his grandparents' beads, then a few years later his great grandparents beads. The joke in the family was that if he'd lived a few more years they'd have been the beads leftover from the purchase of Manhattan many centuries ago. Those beads, being the oldest and truthfully among the shorter strands get a placement of priority near the top of the tree. Then string of beads after string of beads went on until I was satisfied with the look.
Now came the fun part, the fancy ornaments. My Mom and I had both always stalked the ornament aisles from the time the first decorations went on sale until the clearance sales ended. Along the way we've acquired some very impressive ornaments. There were the beaded ornaments we got at a Tuesday Morning store when they had them on sale many years ago. We have the bird cage ornaments with the rotating reflector in the middle that my parents bought shortly after they got married at a Woolworths, in Woodbury. One of my Mom's favorite set of ornaments was a group of four individual cherubs that she bought at Marshalls and loved. We always gave a place of prominence to them. I almost didn't bother putting on a glass clown she'd bought many years ago at our local True Value Hardware store. Even though she loved it, I'd always found it a bit garish and inappropriate, but knowing it was a favorite of hers, I put it on anyway. Spot, the dalmation ornament we'd gotten at Longwood Gardens assumed his spot atop the tree guarding it.
As the ornaments took their place on the tree the memories of when we'd gotten them and how we felt about them all came back. More than a few tears were shed as the tree took form and then finally, it was done. I sat back and watched it slowly rotate, seeing the ornaments and memories rotating past my eyes as I watched and knew it was the right decision. I may be alone these days, but the memories live on with me, and that tree with its ornaments helps to keep those memories alive. Putting up a Christmas tree is as much an act of love and remembrance as it is an act of decoration. It can move you in ways that little else can. I'm now very happy I put it up. In fact, I may not take it down!
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