Christmas Narrative

Tannenbaum: A Touching and Anecdotal Christmas Narrative

Christmas falls on the 25^th this year and has become somewhat of a tradition around our house. Today, we are putting up our seven and a half foot pre-lit Christmas tree that we purchased early in the season at the Festival of Trees. This is a Christmas charity event designed to raise money for cancer research. Apparently, it is the last year of the program and since they were selling off their entire inventory of trees and decorations we were able to score on this tree at about a quarter of the cost, and what says Merry Christmas more than a cheap, fake Christmas tree.

You may already sense, from my Christmas tree reference that my narrative contains a sad and cynical bent to it. I admit that one of the toughest times of the year is Christmas. There are significant and numerous expectations in terms of family commitments, giving, sharing, worshiping or not worshiping, preparing and attending, or not attending all the various seasonal events. This year I think Cheryl and I worked hard at getting in the Christmas spirit. This does not count the day that I went to a gardening store in late September and saw one of the clerks erecting artificial Christmas trees for display purposes. I recoil from premature celebration syndrome (PCS) and I think that early celebration does deserve an anti-kudo and a hardy bah-humbug. Likewise, in terms of holiday parameters and guidelines, playing of any Christmas music in stores prior to December 1^st is totally unacceptable, as is any display of exterior illumination prior to Dec, or maybe late November, qualifies for the naughty list.

However, we did attend festive choir and choral presentations at several churches, enjoyed the stage version of “A Christmas Story,” attended Steward Macleans Vinyl Cafe Christmas celebration at the Centre in the Square and also at the same venu we listened to the Messiah. We had front row seat and could watch the facial gestures of the opera singers as if we had viewed them through binoculars from seats in the upper balcony. It was that close. In addition I was totally amazed and enraptured at how closely Handell's operatic plot line so closely paralleled the life of Jesus. Uncanny I thought at the time. As a Christmas finale we shopped, just like the rest of the Western World. I think we did it all, or as much as we could to generate a genuine Christmas spirit. I even went to a wreath making class at the Emporium in New Dundee.

In an way of a festive historical perspective Queen Victoria had entries in her childhood diary of gathering around the Christmas tree. This sounds about right because her family was actually married into some sort of incestuous relationship with relatives in Germany who really do get the credit for introducing the use of the Christmas tree to the western world. Even earlier Martin Luther, in his rebellious stage from the entire Catholic Church, had time to decorate a Christmas tree with the thought that the lights represented the celestial heavens in all their splendor. If only Luther had been around for the age of Edison when he gathered his family around the first Christmas tree in the free world rigged with coloured electric lights, fresh out of Menlo Park and courtesy of General Electric, a company that he owned. It was likely that on that first electric Noel Mrs Edison quipped, “Thomas (Edison) why do all of the lights on the tree go out when there is only one defective bulb?” A whole new tradition had started.

In a religious sense however, the Christmas tree, on a two dimensional geometric plane, looks like a triangle of sorts and is therefore representative of the holy trinity. I guess we have come along way since then by adopting a more secular, and dare I say commercial approach to what was once at best a pagan symbol adopted as a Christian-secular symbol and now a commercial icon of the age of shopping. In our own quiet, western way we can clear cut our way to the Christmas season, or as we are doing this day erecting and fluffing out our real-fake-cheap tree. In our home, unlike the Edison's, tree illumination duty falls to youngest residing girl in the family, Meghan. However, (as you read in the introduction) our tree came with lights thereby making Meghan redundant to the task. In the pure spirit of the season we gave and she took credit for the lights regardless of the reality.

Fluffing is quite an important process, as we as a family, recently discovered at a wreath making course we took at the Emporium in New Dundee. Mark, our very gay instructor, started the evening by showing us how to fluff out the very flat and bare wreaths that had recently arrived from China and completely flattened in cardboard boxes, inside metal cargo boxes sitting on a deck of a super tanker, loaded on a dock in Shanghai, after arriving by truck from a crowded hot factory, on a small side street next to a coal fired power station in an industrial sector of the city where they really know how to celebrate Christmas. As I was saying, fluffing is a process that will make this little industrial puppy look fresh and alive, full bodied and ready to be decorated with other pretties (my precious) also recently arrived decorations from China. Try celebrating Christmas without China in the picture (the communist country with 109 new billionaires) and see how far you get, but back to fluffing.

Once we completed the fluffing, or so we thought, Mark had to come out to our table and refluff until the desired fluff factor had been achieved. Despite being gay he was very directive. I mean maybe I don’t know much about gay men but I thought at least with the more feminine voice and gestures he would be less assertive, but then I stopped to think of all the assertive, if not domineering women I had met in my life, my ex wife included well actually especially her. I quickly realized that all my gender stereotypes weren’t worth shit and so aren’t really worth further mention in my Christmas tale.

Conceptually speaking a wreath is really just a round, and much smaller Christmas tree. I thought this observation was fairly profound. After the evening course had finished and I had produced, what I thought a pretty darn good wreath. It was well fluffed, it had five bows made by my own elven hands, with colours in the traditional Christmas theme, mainly reds, greens and golds. I exclaimed in self reflective amazement, “Mark I didn’t think I could make one of these things”

Mark replied, “Neither did I.” and I quickly realized he wasn’t talking about himself.

My own wreath now hangs proudly in my classroom where not one kid noticed it or made mention of it. Which was somewhat discouraging as I have been trying to generate some Christmas spirit there, in the class, and invited kids to bring in decorations to make the class more festive for the season, to capture the mood and get in the Christmas Zone, but all to no avail, not one decoration was brought in, none, zero, zilch, nodda one. I concluded that in some places the Christmas spirit is dead or dying as it seems to be this year in my classroom.

For Christmas spirit I had to go back further in my past. Probably the most memorable tree I have every erected was also the ugliest. Flashback with me some twenty years when Paul and Jess were much smaller critters and I still had the zeal and zest to go out into the bush close to nature and hike in knee deep snow, much like as celebrated by the Griswold family, (National Lampoon Christmas Vacation, circa1989), and seek out that one special tree. As it turned out the trees in this particular neck of the woods were so scrawny I decided to cut down two and bind them together in some manner that I had not quite conceptualized yet, but knew must be possible. The kids were thrilled they now had two trees. We tied them to the roof of the car and in the fading winter light of the northern Alberta sky I saw and soon realized that even these two trees if merged still did not equate to anything near to the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. These parts just did not cut it.

At home I managed to take a hand saw and remove all of the branches from one side of each tree. I saved the branches for later application, literally. I bound the two half trees together with some narrow guage wire and placed the mutated creation in a sturdy cast iron stand and slowly turned the thumb screws on the base until the tree(s) stood true. I then meticulously drilled several holes along the length of the trunk in which I deftly inserted some of the branches I had cut earlier. It was the ultimate in recycling and reusing a concept that had not yet been coined, I knew I was on the leading edge of something or other. Later that evening I presented the tree to the family, suddenly the room seemed cloudy and gloomy and snide comments about Charlie Brown were heard as we decorated the tree(s). My feeble attempts at morale boosting did not carry the day. I felt like going to the attic and watching home movies. I was greatly encouraged concerning the worth of my manufactured tree when just this week when Paul remembered and mentioned with fondness this very same tree(s). Christmas is about making life long memories.

While living in the Bahamas (1978-81) celebrating Christmas was a surreal activity. Putting up exterior lights in plus 80 degrees F (Celsius had not yet been invented) did not seem right. In fact it did not seem manly. I was use to a life of poor planning within a framework of weak organizational skills in which I would put the exterior lights up only weeks before Christmas in minus temperatures, braving the elements, climbing icy ladders and stapling my gloved fingers to the cedar shingles along the roof line. In a tropical climate I could go out in my shorts, while sipping beer and using a step ladder, and have the lights up in minutes. It was embarassing and unmanly, but very Christmassy in a summery way.

Being true Canadians we had to have a real Christmas tree from the homeland and not some fake, artificial, plastic product from a cardboard box refer to paragraph 7 for the whole China scenario. We had picked up the perfect tree from an Anglican church fund raiser. It had actually been harvested from a Nova Scotian tree farm in October (Christmas as I mentioned in my introductory sentence falls on Dec 25^th) and transferred to some slow tramp steamer that, probably and just for spite sails to China first, before entering Nassau harbour where the trees are brutally manhandled and trucked over to the Anglican church bazaar where I later bought it for an inflated price. But I had the real deal. Sadly, but not surprisingly, like my Charlie Brown bi-tree, it too lost its needles rapidly on the hot tropical evenings. It stood with blazing lights basting the scorching the tortured needles until they fell in fistfuls, as if under going some sort of sadistic coniferous chemotherapy

My Bahamian experience with Christmas trees brings to the fore the hotly contested controversy between the purest, who maintain that Christmas can only be honoured beneath the bows of a Scotch pine tree shipped in from a tree farm in Nova Scotia (or grown locally) and those who would and could settle for the boxed variety. I have seen silver trees. I have seen pink artificial trees and recently at a HO HO event where we paid to go on a tour viewing Christmas decorations in the private mega homes of the rich and powerful who really know how to celebrate Christmas. Because as we all know only the rich are happy damn it. It was on this tour that I saw my first artificial upside-down tree. The base faced the ceiling complete with presents. I have to admit it was definitively a space safer on the floor level and perfect for a 650 square foot condo, but how can one celebrate Christmas with an inverted tree?

The Christmas season likely ends on New Years Day or shortly after, much of the spirit may wind down before that date. Although the Ukrainians get the best of both worlds and know how to stretch Christmas out until at least January 7^th. I feel the consumer beast dies sometime during Boxing Day week when all the sales are finally over and prices go back to where they were before the madness began and with that madness comes the end of another Christmas season. I guess for Cheryl and I that officially happened on January 6^th when coming home from a factory outlet boxing sale in an abandoned warehouse at the edge of town, Cheryl suggested that we see some Christmas lights on the houses. I replied “Cheryl my dear wife of several winters, I truly believe that the season of lights is over and we will be sorely disappointed.”

Despite the warning we cruised several neighborhoods and did in fact see a few lights here and there, mainly there, and sadly headed the intrepid Subaru to the subterranean confines of our new apartment home. From the balcony, 16 floors up, I could scan the city. The lights were out and Christmas was over until next time.

Happy New Years


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