The Stories We Tell Ourselves About the Holidays
Unreliable narrators, fibbers, and sentimentalists abound.
This is about a Christmas tree.
Once upon a time, there was a photograph of a huge Christmas tree that took over a good third of your family’s living room with its top branches spreading far across the high ceiling. It was a grainy, unfocused photo even when taken, and it increasingly faded with each passing year, which is maybe why it might have been discarded. You and your sister had been tasked to go out without the rest of the family to buy the tree. That, in itself, was unusual, since everyone always went together to make sure the right tree was picked. You could come up with several reasons why it was just you and her, but you’re trying to keep to facts, which is always tricky with you.
In any case, the vision of this monster tree lingers because its size presented quite an annoying problem: It took up too much room; there were not enough lights to go around; more ornaments had to be purchased. Your mom added the most horrific dilemma that you and your sister caused: How would the tree be taken down and carted to the curb without embedding the carpet with piles of large needles that would remain like thorns until the following year, no matter how many times the sweeper passed over them!
You could have pulled out the excuse that this tree, except for it’s exceptional girth, appeared no bigger than all the other family Christmas trees before it. Somehow, they never presented a problem. Santa Claus always managed to navigate around them. Relatives, in their boisterous excitement, may have jostled the branches laden with bubble-lights and tinsel, but no one complained. Such a tree clearly partnered with the plush musical Santa Claus. Your mom bustled happily about the tree redistributing ornaments until, around New Year’s, she decided it might be perfect. Your dad loved to sit in his club chair with his Santa head beer mug until late at night in the rainbow glow of the tree’s lights while Frank Sinatra sang his favorite songs. The sweet scent of pine sap lingered for weeks afterwards.
Almost always it was snowing outside.
You text your sister because you’re sure she would love to reminisce with you. “You remember that tree you and I brought home the year Dad sent us out alone to get one?”
“We always went together.”
“Not this time.”
“I don’t think that’s right.”
Without the evidence of the photograph, you have nothing to jostle her memory about this specific tree. You say she drove, so she must have been 18 or 19 years old, which would make you 14 or 15, two teenage girls annoying the hell out of their mom, who would not have enjoyed your company while making her famous spritz cookies. Your dad could have been away working; your brother playing basketball. Perhaps it was later in the season than usual, and all that was left in the lot were unacceptable scrawny things and this fine specimen whose sheer size would have scared off more practical minds.
“I remember many big-ass trees,” your sister says.
“This was bigger, though. ”
She has more interesting subjects to discuss with you and steers the conversation to things that are actually happening now.
The gargantuan tree might have served to splinter all the other family Christmas trees that followed. They became skinnier and slightly smaller, few requiring the purchase of more balls and lights. Your mom increasingly didn’t care to rearrange what ornaments remained. Your dad could not always be found lingering long in the season’s rainbow glow. There were fewer decorations about the house—outside, simply a wreath and a fake garland rope; inside, a red and green plastic chain woven with holly draped over the passageway from living to dining room with a fake mistletoe ball dangling in the middle that no one seemed to kiss under. But still, the musical Santa warbled out its carols and the chipped Santa beer mugs filled with beer.
And it always seemed to snow.
As the years passed and, one by one, your sister and brother and you went away to college, married, or moved to another city, the family trees truly diminished. Eventually your sister, now living with her young family in a large rumpled house, took over the holiday. There, in the entrance hall, her husband hauled in a tree just as huge, maybe even more so, than the one you and she once carted home that time. You and your brother kept up the traditions with your own families big-ass trees, although none came close to your mythical tree.
“None of them did,” your husband says. (He once saw the photo of the mythical tree.)
“Most were that size.”
“You’re exaggerating again,” he smiles because he loves to call out your fibs.
Surely, though, your sister and brother adhered to family rules.
“We got ours from Ikea,” your sister says by way of noting her family trees were in the Scandinavian model—squat and bulbous around the middle, sparse on top, and $20 a pop.
“I forget,” your brother says, and his wife and children are not around to help him recall. Given this evidence, none of his trees could possibly be remotely memorable.
By the time your parents died, their decorations fit into one cardboard box—a string of lights, a few red balls, the mistletoe ball, the dingy musical Santa and mugs.
“You have the mugs, right?” you ask your brother, sure that you’re right.
“I’ll have to check my box, but I don’t think so.”
“You have the musical Santa,” you say to your sister with an absolutely certain tone.
“No, I don’t. I don’t know where it went.”
“You mean it’s lost!? What about the mugs?”
She’s not sure about those either, but maybe she gave them to one of her daughters.
“I have this red plastic thing,” your brother tells you later. “Need a picture?”
He doesn’t even remember what the red plastic thing looks like, a very deflating state of affairs. The one decoration you have from your Christmas past is the cardboard Santa riding a torn sled that your mom bought after her wedding in November. It’s kept in the china closet and each year you gingerly take it out and safely display it on the dining room table.
But they all must keep to a giant Christmas tree. It’s in your blood. It’s how you were raised, what remains of your parents’ influence.
“I’m downsizing,” your sister says. She puts a tiny fake tree on a table with fewer decorations than your parents’ last tree because it’s nice for her grandchildren.
Your brother just sent you a photo of his family’s last-year tree that they decorated and tucked gifts under.
This photograph forces you to lie down with your head under the pillow, wondering if your family is going to hell in a handbasket.
But then there is you, the only one maintaining the family tradition of a tall tree that always requires the purchase of more ornaments. The family sits around in the warmth of its blaze and listens to carols, including Frank Sinatra. Pine needles burrow into the carpet until the following December. Now and then you are blessed to discover in the tree lot a monster that takes over your narrow living room.
All is as it was, except it doesn’t seem to snow anymore.
Dear Unreliable Narrator: This one really got me, so beautiful and funny, sad too, how time alters memories, perceptions, intentions, holidays. I believe your version of the big tree, who bought it, and am glad to read you keep up the tradition from your lovely mind.
My dad loved everything about Christmas... getting the tree, always a big one, and how after it was decorated he would lie on the couch in the living room and look at it with music playing on the hi-fi. The year he died we had Christmas at my uncle’s 100 miles away. I made mention to my mom there was no tree. We came back from midnight mass and he had piled the presents up as best he could in the shape of a tree. It just wasn’t the same.