STALKING THE WILD CHRISTMAS TREE

Confession time: I don’t like autumn. There’s less daylight. The garden is naked. My mood seems to worsen as the air chills. By daylight savings time, just getting out of bed has become an Olympic event. I am not always a gold medalist. Some days, I don’t even pass the qualifying round.

I am given to introspection, perhaps more often than I should be. In the fall, this inner awareness takes on titanic proportions. Autumn brings a clarity to memory that rivals being there the first time around.

Every petty event, every minor trauma that has ever occurred in my life replays itself with holographic accuracy, magnified to show texture. The merest slights become major insults, and emotions are amplified, until I am left most nights lying awake in bed, kicking myself for my stupidity, and regretting things I said or should have said. I am convinced everyone still hates me. And these are just memories from the age of ten.

I don’t like autumn. My days start in darkness. My days end in darkness. I am convinced that I will only ever see the sun through my window at work, for as long as I live. By mid-November, I am coming unglued.

My nightly reveries of embarrassment and disgrace are carrying over into my waking hours. I don’t want to have contact with anyone. There is no good news on the radio. I think I saw a snowflake fall past my window. I am convinced that faking my own death and running off to Fiji is a perfectly reasonable solution to all my problems.

Past Thanksgiving, I’ve hit bottom. Television and leftover pie are my best friends. My family has started plotting against me. Two weeks before Christmas on a Saturday afternoon, they kidnap me off of my own couch, throw me in the car, and drive me out to the country. We disembark at a tree farm, and a saw is placed in my hand.

I look at my family. Then I look at the implement of destruction I’ve just been handed. Then I look back at my family. “Are you sure you want me carrying this?” I ask. Jess simply points me in the direction of the rows of Scotch Pines and Douglas Firs. I have been handed a mission, and I must now put away all of my self-indulgent misery and find . . . the perfect tree.

The perfect tree is a Balsam Fir about a foot taller than me. Don’t ask me why. There are some things you just know, and the English language is completely inadequate for the task of conveying the principals of the esoteric art of Christmas tree hunting. It is a half an hour hike through rows of clearly inferior trees until we find the one we came for. Good height, full branches, and no bare spots. For a brief moment, I channel my frustration into the saw, and remove my prey from the ground. We bundle it up, tie it to the car, and take our trophy home.

By the time I’ve arrived home, my focus has begun to shift away from wet blanketry, and towards the annual ritual of the tree: finding the stand, moving the furniture, getting it level . . . and preparing the ornaments.

The ornaments. They amuse my wife to no end. They have been carefully preserved year after year since my birth. Each one represents some milestone. Each evokes some memory. It is an eclectic collection. Felt ornaments made as a family project when I was five. A fat child made from craft dough, painted in a Red Sox uniform; clothespin reindeer I made with the Scouts; a crystal stork given to my wife and I after the birth of our first child.

The collection has no discernible visual theme. It is my life story in tchochke.

Placement becomes a meditation. Each memory has it’s own special branch. I become connected to the tree. In sync, we discern where each ornament belongs, depending on which pieces of my history I most feel like highlighting this year. I lose myself in the process. As I practice this curious I Ching, an amazing thing happens. The tide of negative thought and emotion that has flooded my mind the past two months recedes. I am happy again. Energized. Renewed.

There is a sense of anticipation that exhilarates me. Not anticipation of the holidays themselves, there is a stress involved in the preparation for the holiday season that could threaten to sink me all over again. But I don’t succumb. I am buoyed by the expectation of ….what? And where is it coming from? A minute ago I was perfectly happy being miserable. The stress of Christmas is looming large. And I could care less. I’m grinning like a loon. How did this happen?

I have, among my ornaments, numerous and identical images of the holy family, given to me each year at Christmas by my teachers, the souvenirs of 17 years of Catholic education. I don’t hang all of them (I don’t want the others to feel left out), but I do hang a few. I look at that image, frozen in time . . . the joy, the peace, the promise. And then, I look at my own children. I look at every child I meet, and I think, “Why not?” I’m not a gambling man, but the Christmas story is one of impossible odds: hope born in a stable, stars that burn for days without moving, roses blooming in winter. I have to believe that if one child out of millions in one generation can touch the divine so fully, odds are pretty good it can happen again.

I am not nearly so much of a wreck this year. Next week, we’ll head out to the tree farm again. In an act of faith, I’ll bring another living thing into my home, wrap it in light, hang my story on its branches, and wait. And hope.

I wish you all the blessing of hope as well.