I've never had a "real" Christmas tree - the kind found cut and bunched in a parking lot and sold by a church youth group or a scout troop or high school band as a fundraiser.
As a child our family annually erected that most oppositional of alternatives, the aluminum tree, complete with circling color wheel light set off to the side. A silver tinsel-like tree glistening in the front window's sunlight by day, and filling the living room walls and ceiling with rotating colored spots by night like a silent holiday disco. I suppose part of me envied my friends with their sap-oozing, needle-dropping, pine-scenting trees. Allergies were our default rationale for the "artificial alternative", though I suspect expense and nuisance were the likelier reasons in a household with a tightly managed budget. Nonetheless, I loved our silver tree. I loved positioning its broom handle-like trunk in the base and assembling the tree, branch by branch, each inserted into its pre-drilled hole. In the weeks that followed I remember creeping into that magical space alone while family members busied themselves with other things. I would lie down on the floor and be mesmerized by the rotational sparkle. Wrapped gifts eventually occupied the space beneath the silvery boughs, but I wasn't drawn to shake the packages and fantasize about their contents. I was there to be caught up in the graceful pirouette of the tree, the swirling of the colored spots, and the motorized rotation of the wheel from blue to red to yellow to green. That was Christmas, then, to me - the tree and the songs, the candlelight Christmas Eve service and the Christmas morning drive to visit grandparents.
In adulthood I have sustained the aversion to potential allergens and, with aluminum trees now out of fashion, have annually retrieved from the attic or basement or barn the green, more familiar style of artificial conifer. In more primitive times the decorating began with the ultimate tedium of stringing lights in some artful draping, before moving on to balls and stars and tinsel and bows, but having reached the zenith of holiday convenience and expedience, we now simply assemble the pre-lit layers and plug it in. Voila!
There are yet, I'll admit, those occasional and wistful moments when a "real" tree sounds romantically appealing, but the thoughts are as fleeting as Christmas cookies. I rather like our representational specimen.
That, and the sudden ambiguity about what is a "real" Christmas tree in the first place? Is a truncated, now lifeless cadaver of wood still a tree, and by extension any more "real" than a fabrication of bristly plastic and wires? Or cut, has it ceased to be a tree but become, instead, a product - a derivative like lumber or paper or utility pole or mulch? Is nature any more honored by a tree destroyed than by a tree imitated? Is the spiritual dimension of the symbol any better expressed by the evergreen turning brittle and brown and raining down on the floor than by the literally evergreen artificial branches from the box - or for that matter by its aluminum antecedents?
Could it be, instead, that a "real" Christmas tree isn't defined by its material composition at all, but by the life it invites me to ponder, the creation it points beyond itself to celebrate, the birth it's lighting symbolizes and its decorating reveres? Could it be that the "realness" of the Christmas tree is what happens around it?
Could it be that the Christmas tree is like a pancake which is less of a culinary star and more of a simple and unobtrusive conveyance for the sweetness that covers it?
Resuming the Christmas playlist through which Bing and Perry and Andy and Nat serenade us into the season, and plugging in the lights on the tree and sidestepping the corgi snoozing on its skirt, I finger the adorning ornaments accumulated through the years and contemplate all the sweetness they convey.
And it is real. Whatever all the accoutrements are made of, it's the sweetness - spiritually, relationally, sentimentally - that is real.
I'll go outside for the trees.
As a child our family annually erected that most oppositional of alternatives, the aluminum tree, complete with circling color wheel light set off to the side. A silver tinsel-like tree glistening in the front window's sunlight by day, and filling the living room walls and ceiling with rotating colored spots by night like a silent holiday disco. I suppose part of me envied my friends with their sap-oozing, needle-dropping, pine-scenting trees. Allergies were our default rationale for the "artificial alternative", though I suspect expense and nuisance were the likelier reasons in a household with a tightly managed budget. Nonetheless, I loved our silver tree. I loved positioning its broom handle-like trunk in the base and assembling the tree, branch by branch, each inserted into its pre-drilled hole. In the weeks that followed I remember creeping into that magical space alone while family members busied themselves with other things. I would lie down on the floor and be mesmerized by the rotational sparkle. Wrapped gifts eventually occupied the space beneath the silvery boughs, but I wasn't drawn to shake the packages and fantasize about their contents. I was there to be caught up in the graceful pirouette of the tree, the swirling of the colored spots, and the motorized rotation of the wheel from blue to red to yellow to green. That was Christmas, then, to me - the tree and the songs, the candlelight Christmas Eve service and the Christmas morning drive to visit grandparents.
In adulthood I have sustained the aversion to potential allergens and, with aluminum trees now out of fashion, have annually retrieved from the attic or basement or barn the green, more familiar style of artificial conifer. In more primitive times the decorating began with the ultimate tedium of stringing lights in some artful draping, before moving on to balls and stars and tinsel and bows, but having reached the zenith of holiday convenience and expedience, we now simply assemble the pre-lit layers and plug it in. Voila!
There are yet, I'll admit, those occasional and wistful moments when a "real" tree sounds romantically appealing, but the thoughts are as fleeting as Christmas cookies. I rather like our representational specimen.
That, and the sudden ambiguity about what is a "real" Christmas tree in the first place? Is a truncated, now lifeless cadaver of wood still a tree, and by extension any more "real" than a fabrication of bristly plastic and wires? Or cut, has it ceased to be a tree but become, instead, a product - a derivative like lumber or paper or utility pole or mulch? Is nature any more honored by a tree destroyed than by a tree imitated? Is the spiritual dimension of the symbol any better expressed by the evergreen turning brittle and brown and raining down on the floor than by the literally evergreen artificial branches from the box - or for that matter by its aluminum antecedents?
Could it be, instead, that a "real" Christmas tree isn't defined by its material composition at all, but by the life it invites me to ponder, the creation it points beyond itself to celebrate, the birth it's lighting symbolizes and its decorating reveres? Could it be that the "realness" of the Christmas tree is what happens around it?
Could it be that the Christmas tree is like a pancake which is less of a culinary star and more of a simple and unobtrusive conveyance for the sweetness that covers it?
Resuming the Christmas playlist through which Bing and Perry and Andy and Nat serenade us into the season, and plugging in the lights on the tree and sidestepping the corgi snoozing on its skirt, I finger the adorning ornaments accumulated through the years and contemplate all the sweetness they convey.
And it is real. Whatever all the accoutrements are made of, it's the sweetness - spiritually, relationally, sentimentally - that is real.
I'll go outside for the trees.
