The Return of The Tree

I said I was going to downplay Christmas this year. Just keep it simple. No special decorations. Nothing nostalgic. Play only a couple of Christmas songs from my lps.

I just wasn’t in the mood for Christmas. Not this year. Not last year, either. I didn’t even put up my Christmas tree last year. That was the first time in 18 years. At least, the first time for this particular ‘Magic Tree’ a five-foot creation I keep secure during the year in its box inside a closet in my sun room.

And then I got Covid. That in itself is a mood breaker. You feel lousy. You feel isolated. You hope it doesn’t lead to something more than a five-day malaise, followed by a couple of days after you test negative.

And then I got mad. Mad and fed up. Here I am in the twilight of my once-and-only life and I am surrounded by bad news and bad health. Goddammit, this is no way to live. Not if you don’t have to.

The poor Palestinians in Gaza have no choice. They are the sacrificial victims of a strategic war plan that imagines slaughtering 20,000 of them — including thousands of children — will lead to some kind of make-believe peace. Their lives are destroyed. Their homes and schools and hospitals are destroyed. Everything they called a decent life has been annihilated.

And that’s not the only place in the world where some people are killing other people in the most barbaric ways. And people are starving to death. And other people are rampaging through the countryside and slicing people to death as if they were low-hanging fruit.

And people all over the world are hurling words of hate at each other and two-bit broken-down leaders are running for office and promising to destroy democracies. And Russia has invaded Ukraine and has slaughtered thousands of men ,women and children just because Russia thinks it deserves to own a foreign country.

And on and on it goes. In the U.S., Donald Trump calls people “scum,” and promises to release criminals from prison simply because they support him, and to put people in prison who simply oppose him. Democracy in America is on its knees and half the country doesn’t give a shit.

And every day and every hour, the press screams these terrible, threatening stories at me from newspapers and radios and televisions, while people walk around staring at their I-Phones as if the Digital God will make things right, if only the people pay the proper allegiance and focus really, really hard.

And I finally said, That’s It. I will not let all that news and all that hate and all that slaughtering and all that toxic stupidity define my inner life. I will not be defined by humanity’s lowest common denominator. I will not let the screaming of the news overpower the quiet that surrounds a lighted Christmas tree in the muted light of a late-afternoon.

I am lucky not to live in Gaza or Ukraine or any of the other global hellholes where violence destroys lives and children never smile.

Life is unfair. And there is no god who watches over things and decides to make things right.

And so I took my old Christmas tree out of its box, rearranged its branches, put it back on its table made in a country once called Yugoslavia, hung the glass ornaments from 60 years ago and plugged in the lights.

The bottom row lit and the top row lit. But the middle row remained dark. Those lights stopped glowing three years ago.

But that’s no reason to throw away a Magic Tree that has sustained me for two decades. We all give up a few lights as we age.

I read the New York Times this morning and was reminded once again of the terrible things humans do to each other.

But the tree still glistens in the late-afternoon dusk and the memories of past Christmases still revisit me and cause me to smile once again.

I can’t save the world. And soon, I will leave this world, such as it is, never to return. It could happen tomorrow. It could happen four years from now. But no longer than that.

The Magic Tree and Kurt and Ernie beside it are miracles enough for me, and as close to Heaven as I’ll ever get.

None of which will be reported in the press.

A Low-Keyed Christmas

It will be Christmas in 13 days and I have no feel for it. I have mailed my cards. I have bought some gifts. I have received in the mail my 2024 Currier and Ives calendar from Travelers Insurance and hung it behind this year’s final version.

I have bought some Christmas sweets to bring to dinner on the 25th, when I join my cousins in our annual get-together. They are nice enough to invite me each year — to Thanksgiving, to Christmas, and to Easter dinner. Without them, I would spend those holidays alone. Joan even bakes me a vegetarian dinner.

Christmas used to be my favorite holiday. Rich with decorations and a tree in the house and 70-year-old ornaments and music on LP records dating back to the 1950’s.

But I did not put up my tree last year and won’t again this year. I doubt I will ever put it up again. It is an artificial tree that looks as real as one growing in the Second Woods — which were the woods across Evergreen Avenue, which my uncles warned me not to enter, when I was eight years old and my mom and I were living with my grandparents.

I think of those years with great tenderness. My grandfather came from Germany and my grandmother from Croatia, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They brought an Old World character to each Christmas. My grandmother made desserts that would have felt at home in cities and towns along the Rhine.

But everyone from those long-ago Christmases is long-ago dead. And so are my parents. At 86, I have outlasted them all, although my mother did reach the age of 95. Only my brother, ten years younger than me, survives. He lives half the year in Kansas City and the summers in Connecticut. He will stop by to visit me on the 20th, as he and his wife spend Christmas with their daughter and her family.

Years ago, when I was married, my wife and I always did Christmas right, hanging some of the same ornaments as today and playing the same music and visiting my parents and brother and whomever he was dating at the time. After she and I divorced and I began a long-term relationship with another woman, we carried Christmas forward without missing a beat. Everything continued to flow in all its wondrous magic.

And even when I lived alone after we parted, I kept the spirit alive and breathed new magic into the old mythic forms, year after year, decade after decade.

But that spirit sagged last year and seems to have retired this year. The magic has faded. No sled marks near the chimney. No hay in the stable. No virgin births in Gaza. And the Wise Men have been rendered irrelevant by Artificial Intelligence.

I will leave the ornaments unpacked this year and the ‘magic tree’ confined in its case. I may put a couple of the figurines around and may light a candle. But that will be it.

Except, of course, for the music. I will still play the LP records. One song, in particular, always brings a tear to my eye. I have two versions of it: one by the Robert Shaw Chorale on an RCA Camden recording, and one by a German group, the Kaufbeurer Martinsfinken on an old Nonesuch recording.

One translation of that song has it as, “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” written by Michael Praetorius.

The German version simply quotes the first line as the title: “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen.”

I prefer the “E’er Blooming” translation. It has a nice James Joycean feel.

The song tells the story of the rose — Jesus — suddenly being born (’blooming’) in the winter cold . . . “brought to us alone by Mary, the pure maid . . . She has borne a child which makes us blessed,” says the song.

How nice to think that there was a time — a long time ago — when we could feel blessed.

Praetorius lived in the 16th century. In those days, a stable for cows and chickens was unlikely to be hit by a missile. A baby god being born today under similar circumstances may not be so lucky.

This year, I think I’ll keep the lights low and a candle in the window. Reverie is always best served in the shadows.