This Year, the Tree Won’t Come Down Until Inauguration Eve
How to survive this quiet, lonely, holiday season with a capricious pandemic in a country that’s still ruled by a Mad King Baby
Our newly blended family kicked off our first holiday season together in early November, 1997 with me decorating a Christmas tree into the wee hours of the morning. As I cursed the tangles of lights, then bandaged my bleeding foot and swept up the broken bulb I’d cut it on, I had no one to blame but myself.
My job at the local newspaper included editing its glossy quarterly magazine, and the publisher had requested a “fashion story” to appeal to retail advertisers. With no budget for professional models, decorators or a venue, I invited the cast of “The Sound of Music,” which was about to open for a holiday run at a local theater, to dress up in various matching PJ sets and merrily pass around gifts under a Christmas tree. This approach also delighted the theater publicist who’d been hounding my boss for coverage, in essence, killing two turtle doves with one fruitcake.
There was only one problem: Where to shoot the photo? If I were working for a real magazine, some version of a design department would have taken the project from there. But at a paper my size, the design department was me. Since it was weeks before the Christmas tree lots would open, I borrowed a fake one from a colleague, and excavated the red and green box of accumulated ornaments and decorations from the still-unpacked garage. While my husband and daughters watched “Dawson’s Creek” in the family room, I converted the living room into a Winter Wonderland. After the shoot, I had the fun of taking the whole she-bang down to make way for a big extended-family Thanksgiving. Plus, my colleague needed her tree back.
As excited as I was to celebrate the holidays that year, the prospect of putting up a second tree filled me with dread. But Christmas without a tree was not an option.
While much of that first holiday together remains a blur I’ll always remember the good parts. After multiple laps around the tree lot with my daughters we settled on an 8-foot noble fir and marveled about how it would never have fit into either of our previous homes. By the time Peter’s son arrived home from college, the house was glowing with tiny white lights. We were all getting along fine, and this new family and new home were off to a promising start.
With that foundation, transforming the house has become my favorite part of the holidays. Well, not the decorating so much as the “having decorated” part where, after a long day of schlepping, bending and placing, we finally flick on the lights, crank Bob Dylan’s “Must Be Santa,” and toast our fine work with spiked eggnog.
But this year, it all feels so different. As I write, it’s just a week until Thanksgiving Day, which in our house is also “Put up the Christmas Tree Eve.” A few days ago, as I stared at the spot where our Tannenbaum goes, I wondered what the point even was. There would be no staff party, no library board party, no book group party, no extended-family Christmas Eve dinner, no family flying in from Arizona or France to enjoy it with us. For the first time in more than 20 years I found myself anticipating the holidays not with excitement, but with dread.
The pit that was forming in my stomach had less to do with the tree itself than with the next two months and my constant worry about what fresh horror awaits every time a news alert pings my phone. How do we survive the holidays confined to home amidst a raging, capricious pandemic, with Mad King Baby in the White House and the sense that democracy might be unraveling before our eyes? I had unrealistically thought the drama might be over by now, yet it continues to be an excruciating slog. My latest outrage: Even with the polar caps melting, the out-going President continues to trash the planet by selling drilling permits in the Alaska Wildlife Refuge to the highest bidder. That’s when he’s not agitating racial foment, or firing anyone who speaks truth to his roiling ocean of lies. Or spreading Covid. Or golfing.
Yet as I gazed out the living room window to the blazing red and gold Japanese maples I so love this time of year I was reminded of the soul-soothing power of the beauty that can be found in a tree, whether created by nature, or decked out with tiny lights, red balls and ornaments made by 8-year-olds with Baker’s Clay.
A few years ago, we broke down and bought a fake tree of our own. This was no easy decision — we had always been a “real tree” family — but it had a clear impetus. After the daughter who was Peter’s light-stringing partner grew up and moved out, my husband and I discovered that we’re both authorities on how to put lights on the tree, yet have very different ideas about how that’s done. For the sake of marital happiness, we bought the classiest pre-strung fake evergreen we could find on sale, and have never looked back.
In addition to helping us avoid the annual light fight, the upside to an artificial tree is that it never dries up. You can put one up the day after Thanksgiving and leave it there until New Year’s without constantly sweeping up dead needles, or worrying you’ll torch the house.
In fact, the other day, as we struggled to psyche ourselves up for the traditional Black Friday decorating blitz, we realized we could leave our fake tree up even longer this year, say until maybe late January, with no consequences other than the neighbors thinking we’ve gone mad, which would not be an entirely inaccurate characterization.
With that in mind, we’ve figured out our strategy to survive what will be the quietest, loneliest holiday season of our lives so far. The tree and garlands went up the day after Thanksgiving, per family tradition, where they will serve as a backdrop for our various zoom gatherings. And, come Jan. 1, our private lights-extravaganza will continue to blaze away, shoring up our spirits through what in all likelihood will be more dark days ahead.
Then on Jan. 19, everything comes down, gets packed away, and we go to bed early in anticipation of Jan. 20. That day, we’ll open the champagne we’d ordinarily enjoy on New Year’s Eve, and welcome in our real new year. The more I’ve thought about it, the more sense it’s made.
Remember last New Year’s when we all talked about how bad 2019 had been and gamely toasted 2020 because “it has to be better”? How’d that turn out?At this point, calendar dates have little meaning. To me, the shitshow that is 2020 won’t be over until the current President’s reign of terror has ended. I’m not naive enough to think our troubles will disappear overnight — or ever — but I will relish not having my sense of humanity shredded on a daily basis.
We cannot know what the next two months will bring, but we can at least be confident that a change of leadership portends hope, at least to the Americans who are not living in an alternate universe guided by alternate facts. Until then, the Christmas tree and all the holiday trappings will stay up in our house as a visual vacation from these static walls we’ve been staring at for months on end. The constellation of lights will double as a reassuring promise of better days ahead, and an incentive to stay home, stay safe.
After four years of surviving a fake president I’m fine with artificial Christmas trees, whether borrowed or proudly owned. And, regarding the often tedious work of decorating for the holidays, let me add this: I would gladly untangle lights and sweep up broken bulbs 12 hours a day, every day, if it could get us any faster to Jan. 20, 2021.
