In the Light of a Christmas Tree

Like every child, I grew up eagerly counting down the days to Christmas, and what child wouldn’t? An unmerited windfall of presents every December 25th, a week off of school, and before global warming settled in to stay, hours of uninterrupted snow play during the day, and hot chocolate and claymation holiday specials on tv at night. It was a dream come true for the ten days a year we got it.

However, the year my dad and mom’s marriage fell apart, the whole Christmas season became something more for me. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it was then that I first discovered the difference between infatuation and love. Up until that year, I had an infatuation with Christmas. It gave me a thrill.

But by the time I’d done all the things—sat on Santa’s lap, shopped for the few presents my allowance could afford, watched Rudolph and Frosty and the Grinch, attended the Christmas Eve service and sang Silent Night by candlelight, woke up Christmas morning and tore through my pile of gifts—I was ready to move on to the next holiday. Shop for my class Valentine’s cards on the 2nd of January? Sure, why not. Sounds fun.

But the December after my parents split up, the season arrived with a heavy thud on the front step to our home.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call my dad a Christmas enthusiast, but his absence that year was palpable. My two older brothers took my dad’s place in climbing the rickety steps up to the attic to collect the dozen or so cardboard boxes which held our Christmas decorations. My dad was not there to help set up the tree, to slide the metal wired ends of the artificial branches into their corresponding slots on the tall wooden pole, a miracle in the making, a tree forming before our very eyes. He did not sit criss-cross applesauce on the floor beside the open cardboard boxes while we took out the handmade ornaments that marked each passing year—the popsicle stick and yarn stars, the badly painted clay gingerbread men—so we could say, “Dad, look! I made this one in kindergarten, remember?” and he could say, “Sure,” while he rocked back and forth (my father was always rocking), a wide smile on his face.

In fact, that year, my mom decided we needed some new Christmas traditions. “Let’s get a real tree this year,” Mom suggested. It was a paradigm shift for me. I had no idea that people actually did that. Sure, I’d seen it in movies and on tv, but real people—normal people—got real Christmas trees for inside their houses?

Yes, Virginia, there are real Christmas trees.

So off to the tree lot we went. Being the novices that we were, we took a play out of Clark Griswold’s game book and chose the tree that looked perfect in the wide open space of the great outdoors, only to get it home and see that it was mammoth, its girth roughly half the size of our living room with its coned head smashed up into our ceiling. But it didn’t matter. It was a new tradition. And it was our tree.

We strung it with miles of lights and hung our haphazard collection of ornaments upon it while Andy William’s “Merry Christmas” album crooned from the record player. Yes, I felt the absence of my dad, but I felt something else. Hope, perhaps? Joy? Back then, I didn’t have the language to attach to those emotions, but paging back through my memories now, I think that’s exactly what it was: a light in our darkness.

That year, every standard of the season came in technicolor to me. The tv holiday specials felt more sincere, the shopping more intentional, Christmas Eve in candlelight more reverent. And, yes, on Christmas morning, there was the windfall of gifts, but the miracle that the day represented felt fuller, seemed to fill up the room, the house, the world with a sense of marvel. I didn’t want it to end.

But most of all, I wanted to keep our Christmas tree up forever. Each night that my mom would allow it, I camped out by our Christmas tree. Snuggled under blankets on the couch, I drifted off to sleep in its comforting glow and woke grateful throughout the night to find it still there.

Yes, indeed, that year I fell head long in love with Christmas.

Two weeks ago after we’d put up our family’s Christmas tree, our Littles planned to have a sleepover beside it and asked me to join them. Now, I’m a bit of Protective Pattie when it comes to my sleep. I’m not one that functions well without my full 7 hours, so I’m careful about my night-time routines, and that nearly always includes sleeping in my own dreamy bed with my cozy sheets, blankets, and pillows. That’s my time-tested method to good rest, and I stick to it.

But when my baby girl looked up at me with her big brown eyes and asked, “Mama, aren’t you going to sleep down by the tree with us tonight?”, the only answer was yes. So that evening I found myself shoe-horned into our sectional with our Littles sprawled out beside me and our Christmas tree glowing like a beacon in the darkness. Lying there, I remembered that year after my parents split up. And I noticed something: this Christmas felt similar to that one thirty-five years ago. I couldn’t pinpoint the why; that would come a few days later. But the familiarity was there.

The following week, I found myself with a few spare moments at our bookshop and undertook the Herculean task of deleting old videos from my phone. Since my younger children don’t have phones of their own, they often commandeer mine to record non-sensical skits with their neighborhood friends, which I need to clear out from time to time. But as I tidying things up in my library, my eye caught on the barely lit frame of a video I didn’t recognize. I clicked on it.

The room in the clip is dark, the only figure illuminated in it is my father, rocking in his recliner in the dual glow of the tv, whose news broadcaster can be heard speaking in the background, and the lights from the Christmas tree shimmering behind. And then my dad is singing. His chin is tilted up so he can hit the high notes of “Mele Kalikimaka.” It is the signature holiday song of his homeland, and he is performing it with the gusto of a native son.

In the light of a Christmas tree.

This was the first time I’d seen my father since he died in August. I have not yet had the fortitude to listen to the saved voicemails I have on my phone from him, let alone go looking for footage of him. Here. In the before. So I did what I knew I would do when the moment finally came to see him again. I stood over my phone and cried. I now knew why this Christmas was so like the one three decades before. It is the newness of absence again.

I am missing my father.

But this unexpected video felt strangely like a gift. Leading up to that moment, I could not imagine being able to hear my father’s voice again, see the profile of his face, watch the familiar rocking of his body in his favorite chair without shattering into too many irreparable pieces. And then as so often happens, the dreaded moment comes to us when we are not looking for it, and it is not what we anticipated. The breaking apart we feared actually becomes a healing together we didn’t dream possible.

My father was sick for the two years before he died, and over the course of that time, I had begun to forget who he was when he was well. I forgot his playfulness, the surprising childlikeness that sprung up at unexpected times, like this moment captured on my phone. But this video reminded me of who my father once was. And what to some in this world might seem like as naivety, who I imagine him to be now. No, not here on earth. But somewhere, not far away. In fact, closer than I can imagine.

And now to you, dear friend, this Christmas season I wish for you unexpected gifts, ones that surprise and heal and give you a vision of all that is bigger and more beautiful than your mind can imagine. May this season be to you what it has been to me: a light in the darkness.

Merry Christmas!