Oh, what a Christmas to have the blues

It took me a solid day, but I have all the Christmas decorations out and up - almost. I still have to put the reindeer in the front windows, but I can't find the sucky-things with hooks to put them up. Most years, I wander around looking for them, give up in frustration and go out and buy more. Somewhere in my house, there are thirty sucky-thingies, not sucking.

This is not the first year I've put the decorations up by myself. Dale covers the outside lights and I do the inside. Marcus was never much for decorating anything. It wasn't that he was unhelpful; he just became too pre-occupied with sorting and counting the ornaments to actually hang them on the tree. Last year, he was still away at school (okay, away as in 20 minutes away), just like this year.

But this year I feel the emptiness.

Last Christmas, Marcus helped me take the ornaments off the tree. As we took each little figure and ball from the tree to the table, where I'd box them eventually, I pointed out the ornaments that were either made by him or about him. You know, Baby's First Christmas, etc.

"One day you'll have your own place and your own tree," I said. "And these are all yours."

He looked at the assortment of bears and balls and bells. "Nah, that's okay."

"Are there others you'd like instead?"

"Not really."

That's when I found that my son was not sentimental about any of our Christmas stuff. I don't suppose it surprised me. Boys aren't usually wired to be sentimental. It was okay.

Until this year, when I looked at all the boxes of shiny doodads and thought, it's the end of the line for you.

When I am gone, no one will care about the first ornament I ever got, from the mother of my first boyfriend in kindergarten. She was not an educated woman. Their family was, along with ours, on the low end of the middle class. I say this because you may notice that the G in Gayle is upside down. It's endearing to me, that this kind, lovely woman did her best to give me something nice.

No one will care about the angel that my friend LaLa made for me, or the one my friend's mom handpainted for me. No one will want to keep the silk corsage Dotty Trapp gave me after going to the Glory of Christmas and seeing me fly. Marcus will probably not even put up a tree, much less pack each branch with ornaments like his lunatic mother. (You might have noticed, in these pictures, a certain lack of theme and attention to chaos.)

It's enough to make me melancholy, but I rallied and reached for a glass of wine. Then I called and w(h)ined to my friend Michele. We decided that I'd put a condition in my will, where my son would have to put my decorations up every year or forfeit his inheritance.

But in case he doesn't, I thought I'd spend a little time posting every day, or every other day, about some of the decorations around our house and what they've come to mean to me. Some of them, like the corsage, are kind of poignant. I worked for both Dotty and her husband, Bob, for years at Hughes. She died of cancer, too young, too soon, and there's still a part of me that feels the loss.

Some of them are funny, like the handpainted angel that my friend Judith kept making her mom do over because she kept getting the hair wrong. The hair ended up pink, but I didn't mind. It's the cutest little porcelain angel, and I love the little feet under her gown.

I even have a creepy ornament, sort of. I worked with a woman who thoroughly hated my guts, as well as the other parts of me, I'm sure. She felt she deserved the promotion that I got (and earned, thank you very much), and couldn't stand it when she had to work for me. That year, she handmade ornaments for everyone on our team. It was weird, but I could almost feel the venom in that piece of glass. I think I "lost" that ornament, but since Dale worked with her, too, I put his ornament on the tree. It wasn't tainted.

Do you have any decorations with stories, or histories? I'd love to hear them.

Tradition... Tradition!

Remember the last post, where I said that getting our Christmas tree was pretty inconsequential? Yeah, about that...

I suppose, picking out the tree, strapping it to the roof of the minivan and getting it home were ho-hum stuff. Once home, I spent a day trying to decorate it, while fielding phone calls and emails about my son's choir activities that I, as choir booster club president, am somehow in charge of handling. Mix these distractions with the fact that I am allergic to live Christmas trees, and it's no wonder it took me all day to hang ornaments.

The allergy is a new one - it began two years ago and is now to the point where I break out, itch, and my eyes water. I need to break down and get an artificial tree. I know this. A beautiful, fake green tree, a pre-lit one. It would save me, both in decorating time and the cost of Benedryl.

Like this:

(BTW, this one is On Sale for $749.)

Call me a product of "A Charlie Brown Christmas", but I just can't. I need to go and look for That Special Tree. A tree with personality, with attitude, with quirks. Over the years, I've had short squatty trees, tall skinny trees, trees with limbs too limp to hold any ornaments, trees that shoved themselves against the corner to hide a bald spot - one year I even had a tree that leaned out into the living room with a rather menacing glare. We chopped that one up before we put it on the curb.

So this year I braved red blotches and burning eyes for this:

Isn't it lovely? Okay, go ahead, say it: it's crooked. Actually, it's not so much crooked as leaning, but not in a menacing way, just a tired one. The fact that the topmost branch is not quite strong enough to hold up my Las Vegas Star of Bethlehem adds to the askew-ness of the whole visual.

Like the tree topper? I found it at a drugstore, after my previous tree topper up and died. It was a pink, mosque-shaped affair, with a faceless plastic angel leaning out of one of the spun-fiber (perhaps asbestos) windows. An ex-husband pronounced it "hideous beyond all reason" but I loved it.

In addition to my questionable taste in tree toppers, I'm not big on the matchy-matchy ornaments. I prefer the ones that have a history to them. For example, there's this:

It's the first ornament I ever got, and it's the first one I hang on the tree. When I was in kindergarten, a boy's mother sewed it for me. Notice the upside-down "G". It used to bother me, but now I find it endearing.

Like this one:

Made for me by my friend La La. Her name is really Laura, but she used to work at a school for the VERY physically disabled (as in, "So-and-so won't be in today because she died last night"). There was only one student who could speak, and she pronounced her name "La La." It stuck.

Or this one:

My friend's mother hand-painted this for me. She tried to give the angel red hair, like mine, but it ended up pink. Maybe when I go completely gray, I'll try pink.

And then there are family treasures, like this:

This is the stocking we had to hang every year for this guy:

My son's security "blanket" was a Simba he spotted in Mervyn's (now defunct) as a two-year old. He grabbed the package and held onto it through the store.

"Are we buying that?" Dale asked.

I pulled on the package once and was met with 2-year old resistance. "I guess so."

Simba went everywhere and did everything. He survived a few rounds in the washer and dryer after he got wet, dirty, or thrown up on. And every Christmas, Santa had to figure out what to put in a stuffed animal's stocking. Thus, the sweatshirt. Sometimes he got a collar, sometimes a sweater. Santa shopped at Petsmart.

Simba spends his days on top of Marcus' shelves now, seemingly ignored, although when I got him out to take his picture, Marcus said, "Hey - where are you taking him?" I could almost feel a force-field, as if I wouldn't be able to pass beyond the bedroom door with the bedraggled lion.

But I digress. When I think of putting these odd little assortments on a gloriously perfect (if fake) tree, it almost feels like I'm committing a crime. If I go fake, I'd rather go all the way.

My grandmother had one of these. She also had this:

It rotated as it played two or three high, tinny Christmas tunes, changing the color of the tree from green to blue to red to yellow. The colors were nice to watch, but the music gave everyone a nervous twitch after about ten minutes. I certainly could not hang my oddities on the aluminum branches, but it would announce to the world that I am proud to have a fake tree for Christmas. On my own terms, of course.

What about you? No matter what you celebrate at this time of year, are there traditions that you absolutely CANNOT abandon? Please share!