Letter 4: On Christmas Trees
It’s a week until Christmas and normally I’d be in the full swing of holiday preparations. While this year’s celebrations will be subdued for a variety of reasons, I’m very much otherwise a suck for Christmas. The dulcet tones of Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole. Neighbourhoods lit by the twinkle of tiny lights that form a collective resistance against the winter darkness. Fragrant gingerbread enveloped in a layer of chocolate. If we’re fortunate enough, the sleepy drift of snowfall.
But the pinnacle of the season would have to be the Christmas tree. There is joyful absurdity in ushering a full-sized tree into your home – and it must always be real, don’t let anyone convince you that a soulless plastic version is an adequate replacement – that fills the room with the smell of pine and sprinkles the presents beneath it with a mess of needles. Its large silhouette looming in the night after the lights have been turned off, a sentry standing guard.
The perfect tree was my grandmother’s, adorned in mid-century Eastern European baubles made of the beautifully-named mercury glass that evokes Greek gods, distant planets, and liquid metal. Their thin surfaces, bubbles of opaque glass, make a satisfactory ‘pop’ if accidentally broken, revealing metallic shards like slivers of candy but which you stop short of placing on your tongue.
They are a rejection of good taste in their medley of intense colours and shapes, from the masterpiece indented baubles with their starburst centres to the bizarre, un-Christmas-like flying saucers, silver grapes, faces of elfin clowns, and baskets of flowers. The tree was topped, amusingly, not with the expected angel or star of Bethlehem of a traditional household, but a tinsel-and-lightbulb starburst, a gaudy relic of the 70s and likely fire hazard.
And then there is the mother of all Christmas trees at Rockefeller Plaza, so large that not even Clark Griswold would dare attempt to wedge it into his living room. While I harbour my fair share of general cynicism, small doses of wonderment are necessary to this singular experience we call life on planet Earth. My pilgrimage a few years ago to see this tree and the city that wraps itself like a gift each Christmas inspired a sense of giddiness, but also hesitation. As hundreds of people descend upon the plaza, there is a momentary spark of collective wonderment, before it dissolves into the chaos of a swarm of bodies wielding smart phones.
How does one capture a moment? Whether it be a tree, a monument, or a painting you’ve flown perhaps thousands of miles to see, how do you prepare yourself to capture a memory, only to find that the more you concentrate on this goal, the more elusive it becomes? The anxiety of that perfect first glance, and then as you turn away to leave and look back and back again, striving to capture that last image in your mind, to preserve something you may never experience again. You search for the joy that one should surely feel in such a moment, and when it doesn’t arise, block the experience out for fear of not savouring it properly. How quickly wonderment can spiral into existential dread.
Thanks for reading. See you next week.