Happy Chaos
For as long as I can remember, on the day after Thanksgiving, we put up our Christmas tree. My granny loved Christmas. Her tree was the fake kind you pull from a box and bend until the branches fill and tip like a real-life Frasier Fir. And it was packed with ornaments, the eclectic sort that complimented the strings of Santa face lights she bought by the boxloads at a pre-sale at TG&Y. Her tree never had a theme or a consistent color palette, like the ones we saw on tv or in the windows of department stores. It just bulged with things she loved and couldn’t resist, and mostly purchased at half price. It stood majestically in her living room, happy chaos in the corner from the last weekend in November until the day after Santa came.
Granny’s Christmas DNA traveled strong. My mom did what she did, and I did what mom did, and my kids now do what I do in their own respective homes. And it’s pretty much an ordeal.
Granny’s Christmas DNA traveled strong. My mom did what she did, and I did what mom did, and my kids now do what I do in their own respective homes. And it’s pretty much an ordeal.
We lug out boxes and tubs, and boxes and tubs, and more boxes and more tubs of… stuff…wreaths and stockings and garland and reindeer and sleighs and boxes full of Santas that I’ve collected through the years. We unpack the contents and memories fall out with the tissue paper. Suddenly, it’s easy to remember what it felt like when I was 12, and when my kids were 2 and 4 and 6, when we sat out reindeer hay with cookies and milk, when Santa Claus was real. It’s carefully packaged wonder disguised as lots of work.
And though we love, love, love the end result of it all, it never fails that in the midst of carrying in boxes and unpacking ornaments and untangling strings of lights (nothing can take a swipe at your Christianity quite like at a knotted-up string of tiny white Christmas lights), someone will say, “This is dumb.”
And the person that says it isn’t wrong.
This year it was Chandler. We laughed until we cried.
The words came out of her mouth as she was teetering on the ladder balancing the top part of the tree while I, from inside and under, painstakingly searched for the mystery bulb that was the culprit of our suddenly half lit masterpiece.
“This is dumb,” she said. And immediately I started to shake.
It was the kind of staccato giggle that starts out tiny from deep in your chest but then grows quickly as it races through your body like a roaring runaway train. Pulsing, I looked up at Chan from inside the plastic branches to where she was posed precariously-- a third of the tree in her death grip—her shoulders bobbing, her mouth wide open but no sound was coming out. And we both knew where we were headed; we couldn’t stop it if we tried. It was the zap-all-the-strength-from-your-body kind of belly laugh that lassos you when you’re not looking. Within seconds it had thrown us to the floor where we rolled around in the middle of green branches and white lights, like little fish who’d been tossed out of water, convulsing while trying to speak in unintelligible fits and starts.
And it hit me, like an arrow square between the eyes, that decorating for Christmas both is and isn’t dumb.
For it had given us this.
And it does, every year. “Putting up Christmas”, as my family calls it, gives us something that we never see coming. Always and without fail. A moment, an exchange, a backdrop for a memory. Something that stays and sticks and would never have been if we didn’t take this aberration off the beaten path on the day after the turkey is carved.
Decorating for Christmas is laborious, and expensive if all tolled, not to mention, messy and frustrating. We’re forever searching for extension cords and ornament hooks and the gift tags we bought but can’t remember where we put. And there’s never a great place to store all the stuff that we don’t think about the other 11 months of the year. So that part really is pretty dumb when you think about it. You can’t make it make logical sense, even if you try.
But the ten minutes my grown up daughter and I spent flopping around on the floor in a sea of fake tree branches and defective white lights? That part was not dumb. I wouldn’t trade that goofy, messy moment for all the money in the world. It’s way more than worth the effort that went into setting the stage.
I wouldn’t trade that goofy, messy moment for all the money in the world. It’s way more than worth the effort that went into setting the stage.
In just about a week, Santa will have come and gone and the barren tree will be left standing in front of the living room window—lonely and weird-- looking like a thumb sticking out where a finger’s supposed to be. And I will loathe the process ahead of me: the packing and loading and the putting away of all the porcelain Santas and the boxes and the bins.
But I never hate the end more than I love the beginning. The ratio is the kicker I suppose. Because there’s no such thing in my book as too much trouble, when there's a chance for a keeper memory to get made.
Sherri Coale
P.S. Go big or go home!