Today is Christmas, a religious festival for Christians. For many others it’s a seasonal celebration, a social occasion for light-hearted festivity, fellowship, and generosity while connecting with family and old friends. Christmas can also serve as a measure of aging.
This came up shortly after Thanksgiving. My wife, Jo, and I typically begin thinking of Christmas about then. We start making mental notes about the several tasks we have in order to prepare. The Christmas tree is one of our first considerations; when shall we put it up?
When we first came to the shore twenty-seven years ago we bought a beautiful artificial tree. We’ve celebrated Christmas with it ever since. In the past, I’d cut down live trees. Over time I felt increasingly uneasy about the sheer waste. I recognized the barbarity to which I subjected this living symbol of kindness, good will and peace. How brutal, I thought, for me to take an axe, hack at the trunk of a tree, bring it down only to consign it to its doom in my living room. I was offended at the thought of the tree suffering a lingering death, while everyone else in the house would sit around it, totally oblivious to its unhappy lot, making merry, opening presents, and enjoying the aromatic scent of pinesap. It seemed wrong. I thought it was even more ghoulish to have dressed the tree up with colored lights, balls and trinkets.
I believe with time I became more humane, more aware of my responsibility to those other living creatures with whom I share space on this planet. My wife and I agreed that an artificial tree made the most sense.
The tree is a beauty. It looks so realistic that at first everyone thinks that it’s the real thing. The tree stands over ten feet tall so that to place the star at the top one of us climbs a ladder. Its branches create a wide girth so it takes careful maneuvering to get close enough to the tree to decorate it. So, for the last twenty-seven years we have enjoyed this marvelous man-made symbol of Christmas and the holidays.
Putting it up and taking it down, however, has always been a strenuous although rewarding exercise. The day after Thanksgiving this year, while thinking about putting up the tree, for the first time, the prospect seemed onerous to me. I could see only a lot of work ahead and I didn’t enjoy the thought. I suggested to Jo that we forgo our lovely but humungous tree this year and instead we buy one of those small ones that fit on a table – lights and decorations all included. “Pick one up at Target,” I suggested.
You’d think by her reaction that I had suggested just skipping Christmas altogether. She looked at me as though I were the Grinch casting a pall over her anticipation of the Christmas rites as we’d celebrated them all these years. She’d have none of it.
A part of my spirit was willing but my flesh wasn’t. I’d been finding it increasingly difficult in the last few years twisting and turning in order to put each branch in the metal post serving as the trunk. We put branches in from the top down. Nearer the floor required of me to become wholly prostrate near the base of the tree to get branches placed properly. They could be tough to insert and so I’d coil, twist, stretch and wind my body in ways that twenty years ago, would have been a piece of cake. I knew I could get on the floor, but wasn’t sure I could get up. I decided that this was one battle our marriage didn’t need and I was prepared, in the spirit of selflessness, to offer my aging body as a sacrifice for her happiness; sort of like a Christmas present. We’d put up the tree.
Turned out that it was unnecessary. Mystical forces were at play and in the spirit of Christmas they were prepared to deliver me from my suffering.
Unbeknownst to me, the year before, Jo, who is frequently prescient in domestic matters, saw it coming. While disassembling the tree, she’d figured a way we might reduce the tree’s size the next year, therefore minimizing the strain and stress of erecting an entire tree.
Back then, she had calculated just how much of the metal trunk could be left out and how many branches we’d need to effectively reduce the tree to a little more than half its size while still keeping its charm.
We took the entire tree down from its annual storage cupboard and put it on the floor. Jo rummaged through all of it, selected the needed parts and lo and behold, without suffering one pulled muscle or a strained ligament I happily joined her in putting up the tree.
Although diminished in size, the tree lost none of its grandeur and like the Grinch, my heart grew three sizes that day. It grew in gratitude for Christmas, for still having our old tree, and enjoying another Christmas with Jo, who anticipated my need and helped me age with dignity.
To all my readers, young and old, have a Merry Christmas and a joyous holiday.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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