The lights are hung. Mantel decorated. Tree standing tall next to the piano, covered in ornaments, listing ever so slightly. Alexa playing Christmas music. Today, I'm going to buy a small tree for the courtyard and decorate it with the ceramic C9 lights I picked up at Lowe's. I couldn't believe they still had Christmas lights for sale after Thanksgiving.
We're not doing a card this year. Actually, we stopped sending cards once the boys grew up. I used to write a Christmas letter, believing that because I'm an author my Christmas letters were somehow less annoying than the rest of the world's. I keep them all in a file. Went back to have a look at them not so long ago. They are a snapshot of what was going on in our lives each of those years.
Reading between the lines, I can see the attempt at craftsmanship I put into writing them. Took me days, Literally. I polished and polished and polished like they were great works of art. Alas, like all Christmas letters, they are precious to me and our family, but I'll bet they were as annoying as fuck to those dozens of friends and relatives on our Christmas card list.
Here's an example from 2014:
Greetings from the Dugard Household...
...where an impossibly large Noble Fir stands like a sentinel in our living room. I have nicknamed it the BFCT, and mention its enormity only because twenty-five Christmases ago we had a very different sort of tree. Calene and I were newly married. We had literally nine dollars to our name, which didn't leave much in the budget for presents, let alone a Noble Fir. I found a scraggly little wimp of a pine at a storefront lot; a tree so broken and destitute that I was sure all the other trees had taken turns picking on it. This tree stood less than five feet tall. Calene was less than impressed when I brought it home. But we put it in a stand, threw on a single strand of lights, manufactured a few presents to slip beneath its boughs, and had a pretty magnificent Christmas., wondering all the while what the future would hold. Thus, the family legend of the Charlie Brown tree was born. Its memory becomes more cherished as the years pass — if only as a reminder to never come home with a tree like that again.
We had a friend once who wrote a long and intimate Christmas letter sharing every nuance of the year — every new child, first tooth, report card, and most jarring of all, medical procedures. Plural. Take it from a writer, we all need a good edit. I learned from those particular letters, realizing that the whole world doesn't really want to know about the maladies that intrude upon our Christmas season. It's too close. Too personal. Just one jolt shy of talking about your sex life.
With that in mind, let's just say we had an unexpected communion with a very different set of red lights last week. It wasn't even the first time this month I had to call an ambulance. The house is waiting for my sweetie to come home. Then we can turn our thoughts to Christmas.