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My mother favors a balsam fir tree. We go to Bethesda or Friendship Heights to get one. It takes time to pick the right one out, time which expands exponentially depending on how many kids you have along. Eventually, the perfect tree is found. The person working the lot takes string and wraps it around the tree in an upward spiral. It’s put on your car roof and you drive away carefully.
Once a tree is home and secure in its stand, the decorating begins. Christmas doesn’t start without first checking the line for the lights. You plug them in to see if they’re working. If the whole line is out, a collective groan is emitted. This means you must lay out the lights across the floor and swap out every bulb, one at a time, to find the culprit. God forbid two should be out.
One of the four of us is a perfectionist, carefully placing ornaments in just the right place. Even worse, Eddie hangs tinsel one thread at a time. His precise style cannot withstand the assault of his three siblings.
We’re careful enough with glass ornaments, but we are haphazard about positioning them. Mom will take care of that later. And after all, once the tinsel is on, who can tell anyway? And we put on a thick layer of tinsel, throwing it on the tree in clumps.
Eddie seethes beneath his quiet exterior.
One Christmas, my mother puts a cute catnip toy on the tree. An hour later the tree is on its side on the floor and several glass ornaments are broken. Mittens, our cat, sits next to it and looks at us as if to say, “Bite me!”
It was bound to happen.
Another year when I am quite young, the tree is placed next to the chaise longue. I toddle up onto the hump of the chaise and promptly fall headfirst into the tree, screaming and kicking my chubby legs as the tree goes down.
Like the killing of the television, I won’t hear the end of this until I, or my brothers, are ashes in the urn.
Every year about two months before Christmas, my stepfather John starts saying, "Meeeeerrrry Christmas. Bah Humbug!"
Every Christmas, Mom deputizes each of us to help wrap presents for one of the others. With four kids, that’s a lot of wrapping. In good years, there are a lot of presents. Mom loves Christmas, I think because hers growing up were bleak.
Once, Tyler approaches me in the hall and whispers in a conspiratorial manner: “If you tell me one of my presents, I tell you one of yours.”
This is a violation of the Christmas spirit I cannot support. “NO,” I say crossly. “No way.”
Ty scuttles away looking shifty and finally enters Mom’s bedroom where the gift wrapping is done. After 45 minutes he emerges, gives me the stink eye, and says, “You’re getting a Barbie sports car!” followed by sticking his tongue out.
Well, what did I ever do to hi. . .Oh, yeah!
Barbie's wheels.
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