It seems somewhat incredible to me, but last night was the first time that I actually was involved in the decorating of an entire Christmas tree. Somehow, I don’t remember being involved in decorating Christmas trees before, even though we did have Christmas trees when I was a child, and I have been to many houses where family and friends had trees. But somehow, I cannot remember helping to decorate an entire tree.
Maybe, simply, this tree is especially significant to me, and it’s the first time that I got to help with the choosing of everything from the bottom up, where all the decorations were new and had to have their strings tied on. It’s the first time putting up a Christmas tree with someone whom I’ve promised to spend the rest of my life.
And, like so many other things that have come to pass this year, the tree, the process of setting it up, has been poignantly symbolic to me. It represents a union of effort, something that we construct together, like the room that we painted together, like the life that we are building together. There’s pieces of each of us in that tree: the lights that he untangled and draped, the small soft toys that I placed on the branches in the tree that remind me of my friends and, the silver and blue decorations that we chose to continue the colour theme from our wedding, and the tinsel that we tossed on the tree that gives it a kind of rumpled shagginess.
It kind of makes me think though, about the significance of the things that we do, and the things that we share. They are all images. There will be no wedding, no room, no tree that will ever look like this again, even if we were to do it over. Some of these things last a long time, and some are over within a matter of weeks, but someday, it’s all over, and what we have are the memories.
My beloved shared with me the other evening, about how much his grandmother loved her husband, and went to place flowers at his grave often over the thirty years that they were parted. What was it that held them together so strongly?
Like so many things, relationships are kept alive only as long as we want them to be. And perhaps, the images that we have along the way, like Christmas trees or new clothes or gifts that we buy or receive, feed the impression that what we have is something that is alive. Ultimately, because all things pass, perhaps too the significance is transient, but these things breathe life into the moments, give it warmth and a flame.
I know each string I tied onto a Christmas bauble for the tree, I did so with tenderness in my heart, and that warmth will stay with me perhaps even beyond the season itself. Till the next season when we’ll put up something else to mark the passing of time.
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