The Stories They Tell

Five days ago, we took the live Norfolk pine from our deck into the house and strung it with lights. Two days later, we added the stringed beads, the gold and silver balls and the delicate baubles from our childhood packed in a small green box. Last night, we completed the tree decoration with the ornaments collected in 45 years of sharing life together. It was a progressive decoration project and a fun way to do it.

 

So now the tree is complete, adorned with the carefully-collected decorations that like wrinkles on the face (but a bit more attractive) tell a story of our life. Amazing that the thin glass ornaments that hung over 70 years ago on my Christmas tree in Roselle, New Jersey, are still intact (minus one Silent Night ornament my wife dropped and broke several years ago). Then there are the first ornaments we bought as a married couple, for 75 cents at Cost Plus. Out from the box came baby’s first Christmas, gift ornaments from old neighbors Peggy and Richard long gone from this world, a few from school parents expressing appreciation, a couple our older kids gave us as stocking stuffers. As we take each one out of the box, we pause and remember the stories they tell. 

 

To celebrate the completion of the decoration project, we treated ourselves to a viewing of Christmas in Connecticut  with Barbara Stanwyck. Easy to scoff at the old-fashioned men-women roles, but in truth, they were nuanced and shaded and the characters had a depth distinct from their modern Hollywood versions. Always a sucker for the old black-and-white films, the opening music, the credits that almost always include “costumes by Edith Head,” I could feel myself almost longing for those innocent, more unified times. 

Of course, they were anything but simple and certainly not unified when it came to racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and beyond. But the combination of the films and music that defined American culture, the ethos that It’s a Wonderful Life when the greedy capitalist bastards like Potter are defeated by the good-hearted neighbors, the sense of working together and uniting against common enemies (the above film during World War II) feels so much more appealing than our current deep divisions, the clown-cars careening us towards oblivion, the superficial and musically dubious pop culture, the explosion of super-hero and violent films dominating the few movie theaters left standing.

 

Meanwhile, our tree lights up the room and stands as the testimony of the wonderful life we have lived. It evokes the presence of all those now gone whose prints are on these ornaments. It brings beauty into the home and revives the perpetual promise of the elusive peace the carols sing out. For a few weeks a year, there is a special magic in the air and don’t we all need it. Then the boxes will be re-packed and brought down to the basement, the tree returned to the deck, the colored lights sparkling throughout the city dismantled and we’ll be back to business as usual. 

 

But for now, the tree glistens, a living testimony and memorable gathering of our collective stories as we prepare to turn the page to the next chapter.