Christmas tree dreams

As a child, I knew that the Christmas season was in full swing when we brought the tree home and decorated it. As I mentioned on a recent YouTube post here, it was a major pain to put up the Christmas tree every year. However, I loved having the tree in our living room once we were done decorating.

I would wake up early every morning before school and turn on the tree lights and just sit there for an hour watching them blink. It was still dark in the morning, and even though it was cold in the house, the tree appeared to provide much warmth. I would examine my reflection in the bulb ornaments. There were a couple that were silver, so they looked like curved mirrors that altered the shape of reality.

After school, I would examine all the packages under the tree and see if there were any new ones with my name on them. In the early years, the wrapping paper was not 100% opaque, so if Loyd and I held the gift under the light, we could make out the words on the package underneath. This was the routine for a couple of years. Then Mom and Dad got wise to our "x-ray vision" and started wrapping the packages with newspaper before putting the Christmas wrap on. The only thing we could read on the package was the daily Police Blotter.

For several years, we had an annual tradition regarding the tree: At some point during the holiday season, it would get knocked over. Sometimes it happened when Loyd and I crawled under it. There were a couple of times that it appeared to have fallen over by itself and one time when the dog knocked it over. All the dog did was run into the base, and that caused it to fall down. Mom and Dad would always get mad because it resulted in pine needles, tinsel and broken ornaments falling all over the floor. It was a pain in the butt to clean up, and Loyd and I always had to do it.

It was always hard to bring down the tree, and not because we had to spend hours afterward cleaning up. It meant an end to the season, an end to the dreams and the fact that we had to return to school.

In 1984, when I was a junior in college, a funny thing happened. On Christmas Eve, I realized that for the first time ever, I had not even attempted to look at the gifts underneath the tree to see which ones had my name on them. I didn't know if this meant I was growing up or becoming disenchanted with Christmas. It may have had something to do with this being the first Christmas we spent in the new house that my parents had moved into. I no longer felt like I was home for Christmas that year.

I doubt I will ever regain the same feelings for Christmas that the presence of the tree provided me in my past. But I will still have those memories.