When I was a kid, decorating our family
tree was one of my favorite things to do at Christmas time. Each year I’d
pull ornaments from the box and get excited a bit more with each one I saw: the
mint colored one that when you plugged in a tree light, it lit up to show Santa
peeking into a living room with its own tiny tree, the Hallmark Eskimo’s my mom
has been collecting since the dawn of time (there are seriously like 30 if
them), or the little glass colored balls covered in glitter. Seeing them
on my parent’s tree brings me back to the days where I couldn’t wait until we
got our tree and the branches “settled” (my dad’s stall tactic for having to
bring the ornaments out of the attic) so we could fill them with all of the
First Christmas ornaments and grandchild ornaments my grandma had bought; I
couldn’t wait to fill them with our memories. Our tree was a hodge-podge
collection that, as I got older, I declared I would never have in my own
house. Flash forward fifteen years and I am eating my words in big
heaping spoonfuls.
This year I convinced Sean to buy a fake
tree. I know, I know, and I feel like a big ‘ole traitor on the
inside. I hate the mess though and I’m still finding remnants of last
year’s tree in our sunroom and between the pine needles and the dog’s hair I
spend most of the Christmas season incessantly sweeping and vacuuming and so
Martha Stewart’s Alexander Pine it is! It went up quickly and the
ornaments were on the next morning (“We have to let the branches settle,” I
told Kennedy). I love watching her little hands carefully pick up the
ornaments and decided were to place them as she yells out, “No, I’ll do this
one, you take that one!”
As we went through them it struck me:
this tree tells a story. It starts with a few ornaments Sean and I
each have from our childhood, none that are anything beautiful but represent
our pasts. Next there's the woodland-y things, pinecones, squirrels, a
few owls; I had a theme in mind once-it fell by the wayside with the exception
of the bird we buy once a year to add on. Then come all of the engagement
ornaments-rings and hearts that we got the Christmas prior to our
wedding. After that there were wedding ornaments-First Christmas Married,
ornaments for a wedding photo, and the set of very expensive, very fragile,
German wedding ornaments my mom gave us for a shower gift symbolizing all of
the important things of a marriage. Next up is the New House ornament-I
remember we bought it but didn't have a big tree since we moved in 10 days
before Christmas so we stuck it on the table top tree we had from
college. That same year we were expecting Kennedy so we got tons and I
mean tons of ornaments with a snowman and snow woman with a baby bump so
excited for our little girl's arrival that coming May. After that it
became Kennedy's tree, full of First Christmas, godchild, granddaughter and
great-granddaughter, princesses and other characters that filled our home the other
11 months of the year. And then the snowman family was back: snowman, snow
child, and snow woman with a bump. Though the months leading up to
Christmas were filled with scary and stressful news, we were excited for Jack,
and we were ready to share some branches with him.
And then because they were the first to
go away so that they were protected the best, they were last out: the baby boy
riding an elephant, a little angel on a bell, and his sand dollar-all a
reminder of the little boy that came and left too soon. There will be no
more after those. And that is just one more, tiny crack in my
heart. Just as there will always be a place for Jack in our home and in
our hearts we will always have a place for him on the tree. He is an
incredibly important part of our story.
So the simple act of hanging little
trinkets on a tree in the middle of the room tells a story. So far our
story is filled with a lot of big moments, one of which is incredibly sad.
During the holidays it is so easy to fixate on the sadness, the loss, the
absence. As ridiculous as it sounds, it only takes a quick look at that
tree to remember all of the down right beautiful moments this life has brought me
too.
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