Tree Traditions

My best friend and I started living together in 1993. We had a small apartment with only two windows. It was dark and dank and we loved it because it was ours and we weren't at home any more. I felt so wonderfully independent. We were determined to celebrate all the holidays, including Christmas. 

This year was our 20th year of decorating a Christmas tree together. This is a picture of her naked tree. Well, it has some lights on it, but those are just the boob pasties of the tree world. The true story of a Christmas tree is in the ornaments. My best friend's tree is no exception to this.

In her case, ornaments come in several different containers and represent many different facets of her life, and of mine. The main box contains all of her more expensive collectible ones.  Her collections are usually gifts from family members. I know that her sister started several of the series for her and it's been a gift every year. Her sister as also started collections for my best friend's son.

But fancy ornaments were not always part of our tradition. For a long while, our tree was decorated with whatever we could find.  The boxes are a good example of this. Like most college students, I fell prey to the company called Fingerhut (which we called Fingerbutt, of course) and bought some of their holiday nasties one year. Each of these little cardboard boxes contained some candy or a tiny, useless toy.  The boxes, some candy canes, and cheap ass balls went on the tree that year.

My roommate still has these boxes and still puts them on her tree. While we scarfed all the candy out of them years ago, one of them still contains a Santa toy. Every year we will forget what is in it. We'll shake the box, open it, proclaim it to be Santa, and then decide that he will remain in the box for another year. I hope that when I die, she lets Santa out of the box and puts him in my urn with me.

Fingerhut wasn't our only financial blunder during college. At one point, we also decided to start investing in a monthly delivery of Disney ornaments. We really, honestly thought we could manage this.

This was such a huge mistake. The damned things were expensive, if delightfully well made. I think we got about four of them before we realized there was no way we could pay on them. It was a costly misstep, so every year whenever Genie and his coworkers go on the tree, they are a lovely and festive cautionary tale.

It takes us several hours to get all the decorations on her tree. We always listen to holiday music. When we were younger, this happened by way of cassette tapes on a boombox. After a few years, we considered ourselves lucky to have upgraded to a cd player . . . still in a boombox.  That lasted for quite a long while, but changed to satellite radio in the mid2000s.  Today, we listened to a radio station off of her phone being bluetoothed over to her iHome speaker system . . . you know, magic. We don't just put up our ornaments. We also put up ones from her husband and the growing collection of ones from her son.

Things have changed over the years, but the foundation of what we do is still the same. The Christmas tree is our collection of memories, the good ones and the ones remarkable for us having survived them. Tree decoration is a small event, I suppose, but it's an important tradition to me, one I hope to never miss.