The Christmas My Street Trimmed My Tree

The Saturday after Thanksgiving

For fifty years, we came close to missing the Saturday after Thanksgiving exactly once, the flu year of 1996. Lee went anyway, and I rode along too sick to get out of the truck, wrapped in an afghan with a thermos.

That Saturday belonged to Hollenbeck’s tree farm, out past Lancaster. Lee walked every row with his hands in his coat pockets and his cap pulled low, looking at tree after tree as if he were interviewing it. Then he would stop in front of the tallest one in the whole field and say, “Dot, come look at this one.”

“Lee, we have an eight-foot ceiling.”

“She’ll settle.”

He said that about the tree, about the porch, about the baby, about the car. Gil Hollenbeck cut it down and shook his head every year, and Lee paid with a check Gil never cashed until January.

At home Lee stood the tree up in the front room, and I stood next to it with a tape measure, and he sawed a foot off the trunk in the middle of my carpet. Then another foot. By the time he was done, the tree was always jammed against the plaster, with its tip bent flat against the ceiling like a thumb.

The lights were his job. He had an old string of the big bulbs, the heavy kind with the fat colored glass that gets warm in your hand, and he wrapped them around the tree from the bottom to the top in the same slow spirals every year. He would not let anyone help. He said I would put them too close together.

The ornaments were mine. A pair of glass birds with clip-on tails that were my mother’s. A tin star Lee cut out of a coffee can lid the winter we were married. Salt dough handprints Beth and Greg made at school, hardened to the color of old bone. A pipe-cleaner angel that has lost one wing.

When the last ornament was on the last branch, Lee would get down on one knee, bad knee and all, and feel along the floor behind the couch for the end of the cord. He’d find it. Then he’d say the same thing, in the same flat voice, every year of our marriage.

“Well, Dot. Let there be light.”

And he would push the plug into the wall. That was the whole ceremony. I could not tell you how many times I rolled my eyes at it.

This year the Saturday after Thanksgiving came and went, and I ate a cheese sandwich standing at the sink and watched snow come down on the garden.

Beth called that night. “Mom, let me bring up a little tabletop one. Just a little one for the end table. You don’t have to do anything.”

“No,” I said.

Greg called on Sunday from Denver. He wanted me to fly out for Christmas with him and his wife and the grandkids. I told him I would rather be in my own house, and he got quiet, and I could hear him deciding whether to push.

Then I said the thing I am not proud of.

“I’m not doing Christmas this year. Maybe not ever. I’ve decided.”

I hung up and sat in the kitchen in the dark. The boxes were in the basement, six of them, stacked on the shelf by the furnace. Lee had labeled every one in his block capitals, because he labeled everything he owned. The lights said, Don’t tangle. The ornaments said, Dot’s. Be gentle. I had not been down those stairs since the funeral, and I made up my mind I would not go down them again until spring.

I thought a tree was something you did with another person. It seemed to me that everybody else was pretending, and I had decided to stop.