Balcony View

Balcony View
This ain't Alabama

Saturday, December 17, 2011

5 a.m.


I have a disease.  It's called the "no matter what time you go to bed you still wake up at 5 a.m." disease.  It's bad enough that during the week I rarely set an alarm, but on the weekend when sleeping in even an hour seems delectable, it just ain't happening.  I still get up and make coffee, but at least I don't have to do anything but crawl back into bed and check email, or read the paper, or goof around with the ipad.  On the weekends I can also take a nap in the afternoon like tots and elderly, and not feel guilty about it.  That's a pleasure in itself.

This morning as I awoke and peeked out into the dark of early morning in December, I found that it was snowing.  It's still snowing 2 hours later; just a light, easy snow that doesn't require the plows and salt but just blankets the rooftops with a nice batting.  The expected high today is around 35 so it may keep up most of the day.  It's a good thing, because I need to do some Christmas shopping (which I've not done at all) and this may put me in the mood.

Christmas is a week away.  I'll be driving to Alabama next week sometime for the holiday, and back to Chicago a day or two afterward to spend the rest of that week in lazy luxury.  I will work on the quilt I've started, and knit the scarf I've started, and finish the book I've started.  The book may be finished, but the others will take more time - especially the quilt.  But until then, I need to get in the spirit.  I put my fake tree up last weekend with all the little ornaments the kids love from their childhood and lot of lights.  I set out my collection of santas and snowmen.  I drank hot chocolate.  I sat and looked at the tree and the santas and tried to work up a feeling of ho ho ho and holly jolly.  Then I thought "I have to look at this for the next two weeks then pack it all back up without sharing it with anyone - what's the point?".

From the time the kids were big enough to care, we would trek out into the woods off a back road with a saw and look for the perfect cedar tree to steal.  We didn't think of it as stealing, but that's really what it was since we didn't know who owned whatever land we were on, and we would have been in trouble had we been caught.  We were poor and couldn't afford to spend money on a nice balsam fir.  I would NOT allow a fake tree into my house, but preferred to enjoy the needles on the floor and the barbs on the hands as we decorated our Christmas tree.  Sometimes the pickings were slim, and we ended up with a Charlie Brown tree that you could see right through.  It really didn't matter - it was the experience that I was after, and the tradition and memories for the kids.

Even after they became young adults venturing out on their own, we still did our best to carry on.  A week or so before the big day, we would gather and go out to cut down a tree.  I did finally resort to paying for one at a tree farm, but there was still the trek and the hunt and the saw.  We borrowed a truck, or stuffed the netted tree into whatever vehicle I had at the time, and made our way back to my house for the party. 

Our tree-trimming festivities consisted of Christmas music, homemade cookies and candies, crackers and cheeses or chips and dips, hot cider or chocolate, and the joy of dressing that tree up just like we had done since they were small.  As we pulled out each ornament - particularly the ones they had made in day care or school, and the little wooden ones we had bought somewhere along the way - each of us would ooo and ahh and reminisce as to which were our favorites and which we had forgotten about, and the stories behind a few of them.  There was the "Lacy's 1st Christmas" crosstitch one that Aunt Juno had made for her.  The jar-ring-picture-frame-on-a-ribbon ones they made in day-care.  The sleighs from popsicle sticks Aunt Darlene had made.  The birds Nana had given us.  And on and on and on.

While this tradition was special as the kids were growing up, and they always happily participated even through the years when kids can become opposed to such things, it came to mean even more after I divorced their dad.  Our split occurred on December 13, a Friday of course (my lucky day), which was too early to put up a live tree in a house with a wood stove that dried everything out quickly.  That year I worried about how we were going to manage, but we did.  There have been a couple of years that one or the other wasn't available to help, but most of the time we managed to be together for the annual event.  It's only been in the last 3 years or so that we've broke tradition, and in 2009 I didn't even have a tree at all.

I think that's why I drove to Target last year and bought a 7-foot plastic tree-in-a-box.  If I couldn't have them here to help with the trimming and sharing of memories, I could at least have them here in spirit as I hung the well-worn ornaments myself.  I look forward to next Christmas, when I'll hopefully be living in Alabama and they can join me once again to ooo and ahh over the memories as we pull them from the box.  Of course, we'll be hanging them on a real tree, with the Nutcracker playing in the background.  I'll have to add a few for family expansion.  And as I get older, and grandkids become plural, I hope that a visit to gramma's to cut and trim a tree will be an event each year.  That would make me eternally happy.

For this year, however, I will do my best to enjoy the tree I have and what it represents to me.  I'll trek out into the lighted trees on the mag mile (without cutting any down), snow gently kissing my face, humming the old songs Nana used to sing, and look forward to being together with my family in a week.  However cold it is, and however alone I am, I have the warmth of their love and the memories of Christmas's past to keep me company.  I trust they have the same.