The first significant act of the new year is taking down the Christmas tree.
My wife and I usually perform the ritual mid-morning when the day is still fresh. It feels healthy having something to do on a holiday. The stripping of it doesn’t take too long, because my wife and I, like many Coloradans, like to see mostly evergreen during Christmas. It reminds us of the mountains, which we don’t get to visit enough.
Even though bringing an evergreen into the living room for a few weeks has to be one of the better ideas in the history of ritual, it does feel good to take it down and pack away Christmas. That’s not say I don’t feel somewhat empty and unsettled for weeks afterwards. And the living room looks empty, too.
Christmas is a crowded season built upon the comfort of memory. There’s Rudolph, Charlie Brown, and the Grinch on TV. There’s the ornamental pieces of our past hanging on the tree. The thousands of dusty yet warming songs and carols. The rituals passed down by our parents. And perhaps most potent of all, the Christmas photos that I believe each of us carry in our minds despite the passing years — the photos of us celebrating Christmas when we were young.
This focus on the past causes Christmas to arrive with certain pressures. First, we expect it to somehow measure up to the amalgam of the best Christmas moments we’ve stitched together over a lifetime. A pretty tall order.
Then there’s the pressure of celebrating it the “right” way. This is why it’s easily tainted by the flotsam we have to deal with in our normal lives — the quirky, if not irritating, behavior of our relatives, and the dog (or soon-to-be-ex brother-in-law) getting sick on the new wool carpet. How many times have we thought that such and such a thing couldn’t be happening because “It’s Christmas, for Christ’s sake!”
And sometimes I even doubt my own experience of it. On Christmas eve and morn, I’ll ask: “Am I doing this right?” “Is this legit”? “Is this how Christmas is supposed to feel?” Odd questions for a 41-year-old to be asking.
But maybe not. Though we might prefer to reach back to the most Christmassy of Christmases, each one feels different and necessarily so. Christmas is just as much about reinvention as it is tradition — figuring out which stale traditions to dump, which to alter so that they become fresh again, which new ones to create.
Easier said than done, I know, especially the creating-new-traditions bit. How many times have we started the season telling ourselves that this year we are doing things differently without realizing that doing things differently takes thought and creativity and, if extended family is around, a healthy dose of courage. New traditions don’t automatically feel Christmassy.
I don’t imagine you’re looking for ideas from a guy who’s admittedly confused, but this year I’m making a bigger deal about packing up Christmas. I’ll do it more thoughtfully and more actively, possibly getting rid of more than I keep. And maybe in this way, instead of treating the activity as the end of something, I’ll treat it as the beginning of something new, something a little more me, something that will be here again before you know it.
Daniel Brigham (daniel@ ) is a writer, editor and instructional designer who lives in Louisville.
