It's The Season ('Tis Is So Two Weeks Ago)
This is such an awkwardly funereal time, these few days -- not after Christmas -- but after it finally has to be over.
I drive to the dump and there's a mountain of Christmas trees, still green from the owners who teased them with water that they were actually going to live inside their living rooms.
There's no good way to get rid of a Christmas tree. No way that isn't unceremonious given everything that you had made them out to be. We can say we're "recycling" them. I choose to burn them, at night, almost in effigy as if they were personified.
We treasure these living things. We're willing to have them inside our homes in spite of the fact that they could help our homes burn down. We water them. String electric lights around them. Put stuff under them. Smell them. Write songs about them.
"Oh, Christmas tree ... Oh, Christmas tree ..."
They're dying from the moment we cut them from the ground, which happens to be the same moment we take notice of them.
Yeah, nobody wants to hear about Christmas. If you look at it in terms of the Earth revolving its way toward another winter solstice light festival, we're about as far away from Christmas as we can be.
We'd rather hear about Christmas in July than Christmas a week after we tear open presents to show how much Jesus loves us.
As I unwound my Christmas lights from the porch today, it struck me as interesting how we put an end to things.
It struck me as interesting that I might not know whether someone with their lights still strung is a lazy, low-class redneck or whether that person is theologically aware that the Christmas season, by strict definition, begins on Christmas and ends 12 days later.
(I guess that's all in the timing. You can't know for sure until summertime, "they" say).
It's something we all do together. And we disagree less with when we start it than when we end it.
I particularly enjoy the time after Christmas until New Year's when there's still snowflakes and college marching-band holiday music on Sportscenter. That has a little to do with being on vacation, but more to do with having an opportunity to enjoy what you couldn't enjoy because you were so ... anxious.
In any case, I suppose it has to end somehow.
And I think you know Christmas and everything that goes with it is over when there's only one carton of egg nog left in the grocery store and it expires on Monday.
6 comments:
I took great delight in removing the tinsel from my monitor at work, several days before the end of Christmas.
I hate how everything looks so bland when the decorations come down after Christmas. makes me feel blue
By the time Christmas is over I'm ready to chuck the tree, ornaments and all, into the garbage. I don't even feel the least bit of shame.
Our tree is still up, waiting for a night when I have time and energy to take it down while the kids are asleep so I don't have to watch them pout about the tree leaving.
I so get their disappointment - I love having a tree in the house. I don't, however, love having a source of needles in my feet in the house.
My compromise with them, and my own enui, is to leave the lights I strung a few weeks before Christmas up on their playset. It really is festive, and so fun. Makes the thing look rather magical, and will add a bit of psychological air conditioning on hot July nights.
My favorite sentence: "They're dying from the moment we cut them from the ground, which happens to be the same moment we take notice of them."
That gets at why I react the way I do when I see the tree at the State House. A huge, majestic red cedar, living happily somewhere in the woods of SC, killed, and then subjected to the indignities of really tacky ornaments for a few weeks.
It deserves so much better.
Trey
I'm always just glad when it is over. It never compares to when I was younger and full of wonder.
I'm almost sure it is better when you have kids, yet that is somehow depressing as well.
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