Oh Christmas Tree

Friends,

On this first day of winter, I was wondering where to start this annual ritual of marking the turning of seasons. On one level, this year’s dark is not only about the leaving and return of light, but there is (for many of us) a larger darkness descending. Its branches are political but the roots are the old and unfortunately well entrenched racism, sexism, and violence that have marked the American Dream from the start. I don’t think I’ll say more about that (at least not now) but instead go to that time and place that is outside of division and dissention.

Where I will start is with a memory or rather a question that arrived the other day.

I am looking at our Christmas tree. Procured at the farmer’s market, set between a window and the bookcase to be decorated with a diversity of ornaments that Christine and I have collected over the years. Her DJ nibling, Deekz, came for dinner and helped arrange them. It is lovely, and all the more so, because of the simplicity of lights and ornaments, each of which has provenance as to where, when, or from who it is associated with. The telling of those stories, or some of those stories, is as much part of the ritual as the placement of red balls or animal figures themselves.

It got me to thinking about Christmas trees past.

Not the ones of childhood, which sort of blur into a universal tree with lights, balls, and what was then ubiquitous and now is rare if not all together missing, tinsel. All those shimmering ribbons of silver draped so carefully on the branches. Whether Hibbing, Albuquerque, Buffalo (Hamburg), or Edina the houses are distinct but the trees are not.

Instead, I started with Christmas in 1965, when I was in the Novitiate, the first year of religious formation as a Christian Brother. There was no tree. I don’t remember one and when I asked Mario Robert Knotz and John Staples, who were there at the same time, they could not remember one either. Who would have picked out a tree? Who would have decorated it? With what? There were no presents to put beneath the boughs. Why would there be?

The Novitiate had a certain aesthetic of discipline and privation. I clearly remember the cold chapel. The long tables in the dining room with the simple “un-spiced” meals where we ate in silence and listened to selected readings from the podium. Summer had ended, winter had come but the schedule did not change. Get up, pray, eat, work, pray, eat, sports or more work, study, pray, eat, walk to the road and back, study or use some time to chat or read while listening to mostly classical music, pray, go to bed.

For a chunk of the year, on Fridays, we had “advertisements” aka the “public” corrections of our faults which even then I compared to shaming rituals of authoritarian regimes. Every few weeks on Saturdays, we would watch a movie. I was struck by the irony of this as most films we saw were European – Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal”, “Wild Strawberries”, “Through a Glass Darkly”, Fellini’s “La Doce Vita”, “La Strada”, French New Wave ‘400 Blows” “Jules and Jim”, and others as diverse as “Seven Samurai”,  “Throne of Blood”, “Rashomon” or “Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” – and darker in theme and tone than the Hollywood films we might have been watching except for “High Noon” and “Psycho” which like the rest were B&W explorations of morality and mortality.

Back to Christmas trees.

In the four years of the Scholasticate, we had small trees, usually ensconced in the common room if memory serves me, that we decorated without lights. It was a nod to the season but again, the aesthetic of community life, was that we didn’t have presents under the tree. The celebration of fellowship was reserved for Christmas dinner with all the fixings and a second glass of wine. The tree that I remember from those years was at the Kendrick’s, a huge bush that filled most of the farmhouse living room that I often thought would reach past the ceiling to the second floor. There was a warmth in that room that went beyond the many children and the warm mugs of hot chocolate.

The year I taught in Appleton (WI) the residence had a tree with lots of lights that Brother George didn’t so much decorate as render a “bonfire of color”. There were presents under that tree, the kind that men buy for each other - mostly books and socks.

On the farm with Gregory and Mike, there was no room to speak of for a tree as in the winter, we had three usable rooms and one wood stove for heat. A wreath on the door or a sprig of mistletoe hanging between the kitchen and living room (which was also a bedroom) might have been the extent of it. The spirit of the Solstice, Christmas, Hunnakah, Kwanza, whatever was measured in enough wood for the stove and strong coffee for the body.

I tell the story of getting the “free” tree for the 7th floor loft when my first wife, Lauren, and I were living downtown. It is a good story and the memory is less about the tree itself than the collective act of getting it into the space. It started off as a 12 or maybe 14-foot white flocked tree that was being discarded by the First Produce Bank and ended up as a “Charlie Brown” tree missing half its branches and ornaments after having bounced up the seven stories from the alley as we dragged it up and through the window. Still, we began with an empty studio on a snowy day before and ended with ten or twelve guys and gals standing around it singing “Oh Tannenbaum” when we plugged it in and what lights were left still lit up.

Less often I tell the story of going with my second wife, Nicole, and our friends Paul Agustin and Eddie French to cut a tree. That was a misadventure of knee-deep snows, misjudging the height of the tree in question (it was much taller than it looked in the wild), trying to figure which end need to hang over the roof of jeep as we strapped it on and having paid $20 a foot for it, then needing to trim off two feet of the bottom to get it to fit into the Selby Ave. house. Yet once it was in the bay window and secured with guide wires to keep the cats from playing lumberjack, it was beautiful.

Even less often I tell the story of Nicole and I in NYC for Christmas after the death of our daughter, Hannah. The city was snow globe pretty with fat flakes slowly drifting as we walked 5th Avenue and crossed Central Park to get to the Big Apple Circus. We had one meal with Melisande Charles at Kenneth Robins’ loft and another by proximity with Mike Tyson and his mother at a Chinese restaurant on Christmas day. The tree? We found a branch on the street which we put in a hotel case and decorated with Nicole’s jewelry. It was not much, but given the size of our grief, it was just enough.

The fact is as I’ve gotten older Christmas and Christmas trees have become the locus of a kind of darkness that is one part season affect and one-part persistent grief. My mother died on Christmas Eve, in a bed we placed next to a white flocked tree with nothing but red bulbs. It had a simplicity that she loved. She would drift in and out of consciousness, talk to entities we could not see, reach over to touch a branch. After, I resolved never to have a white flocked tree. I would have sworn off red ornaments if it were not for the fact that my father insisted that I take them and I’m glad he did. Likewise, with my father’s passing, his fake tree came to me.

It was as basic as it could be - four feet tall, in two sections, with plastic needle branches evenly spaced. The whole thing folded into a box. Living in my Lyndale Avenue apartment, I would take it out of the closet on the Solstice, put it together, put those red ornament that were also stored in a box in the closet, on the tree with a single string of lights. The whole thing sat on top of a two-drawer filing cabinet.

I suppose I could have skipped putting it up or gotten a “real” tree but the emotional connection to father and mother in hauling it out of the box, assembling and decorating would be lost. It was not the tree but the remembering that mattered. It was not until Christine and I bought the condo that I was ready to let that forlorn plastic suggestion of the past go. The memories were and are etched in muscle and bone.

Christine is a big Christmas devotee for reasons that are also deeply etched in the muscle and bone of family history. From the sending of dozens of carefully selected Christmas cards to dozens of equally carefully selected recipients across the country, to the soft twinkle of lights at the windows, to holly and berries hanging on both front and back doors, there is a completeness to her embrace of the return of light in the dark season. This carries over to the precision of her gift wrapping and mandatory ordering of a particular fruit cake from a particular monastery. She inevitably brings me into laughter and a semblance of Holiday cheer.

I will also say that this year our “Welcoming the Darker Night” Solstice performance at the 1762 Hennepin space was joyful. From Kari Tauring’s playing a swan bone flute to Sufian Zhemukhov’s story of “Clare De Lune”, and Ralph & Jaana Tuttila joined by their friend Jean on violin performing traditional Finnish tunes, it was a music heavy mix of stories, poems and songs to acknowledge the dark and remember the light. Decorate the stage with a light up reindeer and three small lighted trees. Add a couple of stories from myself, some mulled wine and a variety of cookies. By time the entire audience joined arms to circle the room, I felt I was ready for the season.

Let me close this by congratulating you if you’ve read this far. As the Finns say, “Kittos” – thank you. If it feels like this is a bit of wandering, an indulgence of odds and ends loosely connected, that’s what I can muster at the moment. This is already late in the writing. So, I will end this with an old poem: Solstice in Placitas

There are 14 poets reading poems

For the longest night of the year

By the light of a single candle.

Between each poem there is

Silence.

But not really silence as

I hear the gurgle and clank

Of the floorboard heating,

A rhythmic wheeze from

Somewhere in the back of the church

Followed by two shorter, softer,

Mechanical gulps as steady as

An iron lung or respirator,

There are babies chortling,

Someone coughs. I cough in turn.

Yet in the dark there is enough silence

To consider the words

And the intention of making sacred

This time and space

Right up to the moment

When the fiddle player starts

A hesitant tune, become mournful,

Picking up speed and then it is

A variation of a tradition carol

Before we file out to another lit room

And are offered cookies and hot cider.

I will wish you well, health and happiness for the season and the coming year.