The Christmas Tree

When I was growing up, putting up the Christmas tree (and then taking it down) was a hassle. Not so much for myself, but for my sister, who was often tasked with ‘building’ the Christmas tree and, once Christmas was over, ‘deconstructing’ it. I thought it would have been more meaningful if more family members had been involved in ‘building’ the tree!

All these years, I have held onto this memory, and I really did not want to go through those same arduous efforts.

I remember that at my first matrimonial home, I had a tree with twinkling lights, shiny baubles, and maroon ribbons with golden-edged trimmings delicately weaving up and around its branches. True enough, putting it up was exhilarating (that rush of childhood splendor finally realized). But later, taking it down was a tedious affair. I was reliving the tedium of a past childhood memory, intertwined with an aspirational desire to be like one of those families who built things together.

Then came the task of putting the decorations back in their boxes and finding a place to store these packages until the next appropriate season arrived; this was regarded as another chore. It was a one-person show for me, and the children were still very young. After that first attempt, I never put up the tree again.

Since then, I have constantly been contemplating how to make traditional family activities more manageable. This conviction was made more palatable as Christianity was not my current family’s religion.

At my second matrimonial home, which was a smaller residence (less than a thousand square feet), we bought a small tabletop Christmas tree. As my husband had designed our home, there was a need to maintain a ‘style’ – a shiny, glitzy, sparkly silver tree would never have entered my mind if not for the ‘interior designer’ beside me advising me on the ‘best’ tree for our home. Nonetheless, I chose to bring ‘this little fella’ with me because its branches were malleable enough for me to hang little Christmas odds and ends on it. I was elated. I finally had a representation of Christmas I could cope with while maintaining our home.

In our 12th year at our current home, I attended a community church service where they invited the attendees (after the service) to take as many handcrafted doves as they wished from the Christmas tree in front of the stage in the hall. My heart was filled with love and goodwill at the Church’s thoughtful gesture to spread His love within the community (to this day, I have these doves because they are meaningful).

That day after the service, I arrived home and immediately hung the doves on my silvery, glittery tree. Its meaningful words of “Love,” “Faith,” and “Joy” were good to hold in one’s mind. I was in my forties then and becoming more introspective.

This year (2022), after being exhausted from daily evading a biological plague (Covid-19 certainly felt like one), which has turned lives upside down, revisiting these words on the doves, which had been tidily stored in a cupboard for ‘Christmas’ ornaments, helped to ground me and spread these personal feelings to the family.

Against this context, I finally built a Christmas tree I knew I could keep up with in the years to come. I placed a few doves on each sparkly branch and stood back to admire my creation. Still thinking it needed some ‘magical’ lights, I rummaged through my box of personal mementoes to uncover fairy lights I had kept from a gift from a relative.

I felt happy. I was particularly filled with a quiet sense of victory that I had not given up on a conviction: a vision I held true as a carer that there are simply acts of tradition I (personally) cannot uphold persistently.

This year, I bestow a sense of goodwill and serenity to all carers during the holiday season.