A Christmas (Tree) Story

Happy holidays, blog followers, if I have any! It’s been awhile, I know. I was busy stress-exercising during the election season, and—while our Zoomsgiving was fun—we didn’t get a good screenshot to post here.

Which brings us to Christmas.

Today the husband and I observed our post-Thanksgiving weekend tradition of decorating a tree. I’m pretty sure this one is more of a treetop, though, kind of an homage to “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

We’ve been downsizing the past several years as we’ve come to accept that our daughter is now, at 27, an adult. This process has included our tree, once covered with every bauble we’d ever acquired, plus something meaningful from each year, plus all the annual Holiday Barbie ornaments, plus anything hand-crafted or -Crayoned that was too cute not to keep.

We’re still not finished with the tree. The husband is determined to find lights that: a) won’t be a pain to put on and take off the tree and b) won’t knock over the whole works.

See, this tree took no less than four hours for a couple of stubbornly persistent quarantine buddies to secure in its stand. I’d spent part of my time while holding the tree steady and occasionally lifting it writing a blog post in my head about the experience.

It was going to be funny, suspenseful (Will this partly decorated thing fall over? Will a precious ornament break? Can this marriage survive?) and brain-injury-blog-appropriate, since each of the “special” ornaments relates to a specific story in our 29-year marriage and the years before, and some of the stories always have to be told to me because I don’t remember them.

But sometime during the task, I looked at my husband, the tree and the view of our city and realized there was nothing I’d rather have been doing.