This year I decorated the tree all by myself, which hadn’t happened since 1972.
1972. The year our first child was born. He was still in the hospital (he wouldn’t come home until New Year’s Day) and we had no money for ornaments. Hospital and phone bills had wiped out an already meager bank account. I found several boxes of ornaments in a closet underneath the stairs of a little guest house we were renting and thought–after a week of soul-searching–that it would be okay to borrow them for a week or so. Our landlords were wintering in Florida, after all, and these simple glass ornaments looked like the rejects no one wanted. Within an hour–seriously, an hour–after hanging the lights and ornaments, I received a call from the owners’ son who wanted to know if I’d seen any tree decorations in any of the guest house closets.
“Well,” I said. “Let me look around.”
He lived only minutes away, so I stripped that tree in record time, boxed the stuff back up and handed them over when there was a knock on the door.
And then I stared at my naked tree and burst into tears.
The following year I started making my own.
Over the years Banjo Man’s sister, who worked at Hallmark, showered the children with special ornaments. GL, who lived in Washington, DC, sent gorgeous, detailed White House ornaments. And we collected our own, plus those the kids made themselves. Our trees could barely hold the bounty.
It was an odd feeling on Saturday, looking at my tree. Not so much because I had decorated it alone in the living room, but because I had hung only a small portion of the ornaments. The Hallmark collections have been distributed to those grown children who have their own trees to decorate. Others have disintegrated or broken. I hung the treasured White House ornaments and some others that have special meaning. But I left a lot of them nestled in storage boxes.
Maybe they’ll have their turn next year.
