The tree may have traveled a long distance or a short one. On a big commercial truck, or in the back of a pickup. It arrived at a place of business, perhaps a big box store where the suburbs stretch far and wide. Or possibly an empty parking lot downtown, illuminated by a string of bare bulb lights and the flames of an oil-drum fire. The Buyer with his four small children reached through the needles and grabbed hold of the trunk half way up. The Seller dipped the tree low like a dance partner. “Stand back, kids.” With a glinting bow saw he cut an inch off the bottom, took the ten, and slipped it into his coat pocket.
The tree traveled again, this time bound and alone as it passed under alternating pools of light and dark from the streetlamps. The car stopped in front of a garage apartment. The children opened the doors, their excited squeals rising towards the sky like balloons. The Buyer sent his children up the wooden fire escape first. “Careful of the ice.” He followed close behind, watching them, and dragging the tree like it was a caveman bride. The openings of the handrail were big enough to fall through.
In forty minutes the children were due home at their mother’s. There would be two of everything this year, two trees, two Christmas Eves. The Buyer stacked courses of bricks around the trunk for a stand. He pulled a cardboard box from a high closet shelf, labeled by his mother. “Ornaments. Billy.” The children grabbed at the mirrored orbs. “Gentle, they’re glass.” Leaving with their weekend bags, the kids looked back to admire the tree they’d insisted upon. Company for their father in his holiday solitude.
Even a young child knows that the Frazier fir and the Scotch pine live on borrowed time. After a few weeks, the family Christmas tree will journey from the yellow-glow of the living room to the cold concrete curb. Or if it’s lucky, to the compost heap. The Buyer spared his tree the fate of waiting. Returning home alone, he placed each ornament back in its box. Bricks tumbled as he pulled the tree out the door and towards the edge of the stair landing.
He could have pushed the branches between the railing boards to free-fall fifteen feet to the ground. Instead, the Buyer lifted the tree over his head like a wrestler displays a conquered opponent. If the landlady’s grown children had parted the curtains of the big house at that moment, they would have seen a silhouette arc across the sky—their childhood dream of Christmas resurrected.
Mustering to mix the glue of our lives that is “tradition” is sometimes the primary effort that holds our lives together – individually and collectively. Dearest Tannebaum is that ephemeral, achingly sweet and beautiful visitor that forever binds together the souls of Christendom.
When I used to get “real” Christmas trees, I’d throw them on the compost heap out back after the holidays. They provide great shelters for birds and bunnies during the winter months. By springtime, the needles fall off, adding to the humus.
Things that we must “let go” can be reborn into new, different things. They may even become completely unrecognizable, as more and more time passes…Yet, the underlying love and beauty are still there.