Let Nothing Ye Dismay Too Much

I was ready to celebrate Christmas, or as it is known in our family, Tuesday. Tuesday with twinkly lights and music. There's always something to celebrate in this big beautiful world, and the things worthy of celebration are more likely to appear to you if you're not all fried with obligation: the shopping, the postal schedule, the traffic. We keep things pretty calm around here. Life comes with enough challenges without picking up burrs of distress.

Dave and I don't even exchange presents. We get each other what we most desire: nothing.

You don't need much when you have goldfinch butts right out your window. Our Lesser Goldfinches like to grab water out of the central reservoir of the nectar feeder. They show us their cute little fuzzy white butts. It's not a butt butt, of course; no cleavage. But it's still interesting. As is the hummingbird that hovers at them hard, giving them what-for. He could totally boop them right in their fuzzy finch fannies, he wants them to know, but he has discretion. And also there are twenty more finches in the tree, and the hummingbird has no friends to speak of. But--he wants them to know--he could totally boop.

There's stuff worth celebrating online too. Lookit, there's a dancing parrot! Oh look, someone made cream puffins! Cream puffs with little puffin heads on top!

Oh look, someone started a thread about transgendered people using the wrong bathrooms! There are several commenters, and they're all in agreement. Penis: male. Vagina: female. You use the bathroom that corresponds with the gear you were born with. That's it. Simple, end of story.

My goodness, we're on the eve of rendering the entire planet uninhabitable, we're on the verge of extinction, we're creating refugees faster than we can wall them out, and the possibility that someone we don't understand is going to want to pee at the same time we do is what's keeping us up at night?

I stood at the edge of the pit just to observe, but there comes a time you just want to pop in a word in case someone is reachable--someone who hasn't sunk into the mire all the way. Sometimes it works.

Okay, it never works.

I suggested that although this is a simple matter for most of us, it isn't for everybody. I suggested it pays to listen to someone who does not have your own experience. I suggested that person might be someone's child, or even one's own.

I was swiftly reminded that this whole issue had already been decided by God. And that I should "stop placating that which is abnormal," and that "the country needs to go back to basics."

And that I was a "typical puppet lefty, calls people hateful & running away cause they can't think for themselves."

I reviewed. I had said something about advocating for my friends, people I actually knew. I had said something about listening. I had not said anything about hate.

Got to give the hateful fuck points for mind-reading, though.

And this coup de gross: "If you're not helping your friends get mental help then I hope you celebrate when they get their ass kicked or kill themselves because you're the one helping that to happen."

I'm the one helping that to happen.

This is just the sort of thing that brings on despondency in a person, every bit as debilitating as the Christmas despondency we've sworn off of. It's not that I can't win the argument. It's that these awful, dreadful people are out there at all, let alone in droves. It's all too much: the ignorance, the racism, the xenophobia. It's almost more than I can bear, sometimes. I ceded the last word and stepped away from the pit for my own peace of mind, but it was long in coming. Dreadful, godly people were squatting in my mental real estate.

We decided to get a tree. Decorate it, for the babies that will be here for the holidays. Turn this thing around.

Guess what? There is a Christmas tree shortage in the biggest Christmas-tree-producing state of all. One week before Christmas, all the lots were swept out, except one. We pulled in. The trees were presided over by the most unpleasant human being I have met in the real world in a decade. He was a horror. Nasty. The kind of man who gets described as body parts. We waited, and waited, to pay by far the most money for the crappiest tree we'd ever had while he conducted loud and seedy business on his phone, and finally he deigned to run our credit card while sneering and grumbling as dramatically as possible. Under my breath, I called him "Mr. Personality." He turned on me so fast and with such anger that I recoiled in fear like a woman used to being abused. It was the most thoroughly unpleasant transaction, I think, I have ever made in my life.

I drove away and pondered the loss of my equanimity. I rarely take things personally. I am seldom so affected by an unpleasant encounter; as a postal carrier, I looked at those as a challenge to win people over. But on this day my soul had already been steeped in a stew of small and hateful minds. I was already tender. You could drop a fork right through me.

I pulled out of it. The solution is surprisingly simple. If you want peace, you must find it within yourself. You must share it with the world. You must be the light you want to see in others. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Also? All the dreadful people need to be swapped out for goldfinches. Soon is good.

And A Happy Epiphany To You

I never know if we're going to get a Christmas tree at all. It's up to Pootie, and sometimes he plays his cards pretty close to the vest. This year I really thought we were going to get away with no tree. That would have been fine with me. We've stripped Christmas way down. I've gone from making a dozen presents, at 15-60 hours labor per each, to Nobody Gets Presents. I've got my time spent on Christmas cards down from about fifty hours to about fifteen. Now we put on carols for a couple days and eat extra chocolate and one year we had a special beer at ten o'clock Christmas morning, and that's about it.

Besides, if we averaged last year's tree with No Tree, it would come out to a normal-sized tree. Last year's tree was five feet taller than our ceiling. Other people, standard-issue people who are neither too tall to see what's on the bottom shelf nor too short to change the light bulb, might think that means the tree didn't fit, but we're accustomed to making things work around here. We're not a matched set, ourselves.

The only thing our trees have in common is us. We've had tiny little ones and great big ones and once we stapled a huge branch to the wall. We don't have what you'd call a tradition. Not like my niece Elizabeth. Elizabeth's mom always put up the tree on Christmas Eve and not a minute earlier, and they'd spend the evening decorating it. It was big and fat. You'd just sort of push the ornaments into it. She had gobs of antique ornaments. I think it was because her own dad was an admiral and lived all over the world, and maybe he had dirt on some oligarchs. So maybe some of the ornaments started out as hair pins for the Romanov girls. Or were made by Currier for Ives. Or lived in Mata Hari's navel. I don't know. They're fancy. They'd decorate until bedtime and then Elizabeth would wake up at two in the morning and come down and open all her presents and that's where the grownups would find her come daylight, sitting happily in a mound of wrapping paper and toys without a single regret. And now the ornaments have all been passed down to her, and she continues the big fat Christmas Eve tree tradition.

Meanwhile, across town, Dave kept asking if Pootie wanted a tree this year, and I kept saying hell if I know why don't you ask him, and sure enough, finally, late on Christmas Eve, Dave let on that Pootie did want a tree after all, now that it was 33 degrees, dark, and raining sideways. You'd think you could get a bargain in those conditions, but no. Evidently, there was a Christmas Tree shortage this year. I'm not sure how that happens, inasmuch as almost everybody knows when to expect Christmas, but it did. And we're in a Christmas Tree producing state. That's what we got: trees and hops and hazelnuts. It beats coal.

But we did find a great tree. Might be my favorite tree of all time. Charlie Brown passed it up. It's got about six branches on it, and it's about a foot wide. It's no bigger than the portion of last year's tree that stretched along the ceiling. "Twenty bucks," the tree guy said, and I said Really? And he said "Yup, twenty bucks," and I said Reeeeeally? And he said, "Yeah, it's a Doug Fir, twenty bucks," and I said "It's a noble," and he said "Yeah, that's right, twenty bucks," and I said "Dave, pay the man." It's the Art Of The Deal for Democrats.

It IS a noble fir. My favorite kind. They're stout and sparse. You can hang bowling balls from them and they don't even shrug. We stuck it in a concrete block and jammed a towel around it, and Pootie and Dave did the decorating with Pootie's own ornament collection, which owes more to the Dollar Store than the Romanovs.

I do know it comes down on Epiphany. Epiphany is the day on the religious calendar commemorating the moment Mary told Joseph that she didn't care what else he was planning to do, the damn tree was coming down now. I guess it came to her all of a sudden.

Pootie's Christmas

We always got a balsam fir for Christmas, because Daddy thought those smelled the best, but even if we picked it up early, he leaned it up against the back porch to keep it cold and fresh until we put it up, which was never early. My parents were firm believers in moderation in all things, even though in some things, like swearing and spending money just because, they were more abstinent than moderate. It could have been put down to a Depression mentality at work, but I now believe that my father was a Wise Man who fully understood the damage that excess and extravagance can do to a kid and her ability to be joyful. So when the tree did come indoors, it was well freighted with anticipation. There was a routine. Daddy was in charge of making the thing stand upright, which took a lot of frowning and dagnabbiting, and then the light strings were laid out on the floor. There would be that moment of hope just before they were plugged in, dashed annually--another tradition--and then we'd unscrew the bulbs one by one until we found and replaced the culprit. Ornaments would be hung by all and later redistributed higher on the tree, and then we draped the tinsel on. Ours was a wrinkly tinsel family. The tinsel was gleaned and packed away every year. Dad put one modest string of light bulbs out on the porch and one modest electric candle in the window, and that was that. Every year I lobbied hard for extra lights, with the same result as I got begging for a dog or a house with a rec room. I didn't even know they made unwrinkly tinsel.

But our modest tree filled the bill for joy every year. Overdoing it would not have increased it. In fact, when it comes to joy, you get less bang for every successive buck, which I did not learn for a while. Christmas is famously for the children, and I was the last child, the one my mom charitably referred to as a "surprise," showing up at a time my folks might have preferred grandbabies. "You're what's keeping me young," Mom would tell me, although the exact opposite case could have been made, especially during my teenage years, but I took the charge seriously, and every year I mustered as much enthusiasm as I could credibly pull off. But each passing Christmas pushes us further away from our childhood, no matter how we try to hold on. Mom and Dad were faithful to our little traditions and that helped. That's why the first Christmas away from home has the potential for bleakness.

I got lucky. I spend my first Christmas away from home in Bavaria with friends, and there were stars and snow and castles and picturesque tipsy Germans and goose for dinner. We were studying abroad, and none of us roommates had much money, so we decorated our one house plant and bought each other  as many presents as we could manage without spending more than £2.50 all told. It was challenging and very, very fun, something that acquiring more money allows one to unlearn.

The next Christmas on my own was spent at a boyfriend's house and was a riot of excess. I'd never seen more gifts in my life, and that part seemed good, but we opened them on Christmas Eve, which was so wrong: abandoning Santa snaps the final bond. But you get over it.


When Dave and I moved in together, we got our first tree, without a lot to hang on it. Each year the tree got a little bigger and more crowded. One year I asked Dave if we could fit a grand piano in the house. He eyed a bearing wall thoughtfully and allowed as how we probably could if we had to. Oh goody, I said, because I just bought one. That Christmas I scavenged a large windblown branch from a fir tree and Dave stapled it flat to the wall that he now had to take down. He stapled harder and louder than might have been strictly necessary. We bought each other flat presents to lean up against the wall: books, record albums.

But Dave was often gone for holidays, working a shut-down boiler at a mill out of town. One year I bought a one-foot plastic tree and decorated it with tiny plastic hard-hats and a small cement mixer for the star, and I wrapped about twenty one-dollar items for him and his crew and mailed it all off. They had to guess which presents to pick. There was an airplane bottle of Jack Daniels and a similarly-shaped bottle of hair goo. There was a rolled-up porno magazine and another rolled-up Woman's Day. It was the most fun I'd had buying presents since Bavaria.

Other than that year, every Christmas tree went up about the same way Dad's did, only Dave had a more emphatic vocabulary. Pootie showed up at Christmas in 1989. It was no accident. He no doubt had a scouting report that confirmed we had no spawn that might dilute our attention, and he moved in and began arranging things to his liking right off the bat. Pootie is, technically, a stuffed dog, and the fact that he generally gets his own way around here is a sign that we were wise not to have children. Pootie indicated he needed his own tree--fine, whatev--so one year we got him a small one, and he jammed it full of tasteful ornaments. His taste, sadly. There were basketball players and ceramic jock straps and a skinny Gumby-Santa and M&M lights and a star so garish that the nativity story had to be rewritten with the little lord Jesus's manger set up at a strip mall, attended by the Three Car Salesmen and a flock of possums. It's da Tannenbomb. Our own tree got smaller and smaller through the years and Pootie's got bigger until now all we get is Pootie's tree, and we don't have one at all. Because nobody wants to see what happens if the Poot doesn't have his Christmas.


After all, Christmas is for the children.