When I was a little girl in the 1970s there were two types of Christmas trees in fashion. You either had a real tree, which was green, or you had a white or silver fake tree. The fake trees looked nothing like real trees, and weren't supposed to. I remember one time I even saw a pink one in a mall.
I thought they were disgraceful. The white and silver ones, I mean. If you weren't willing to go to the effort of having a real tree, then don't bother at all. One year my mom and dad and I went to one of those farms where you can cut your own tree. It was the best Christmas tree we ever had, and it lasted until February.
I loved Christmas when I was a little girl. I knew that on Christmas Eve my godfather, Hans-Jürgen Gherke, whom I called Onkel Hans, would come to visit, and he would bring me fun, frivolous presents; the kind my parents rarely gave me. He's the one who gave me
the yellow vinyl diary when I was eight. That's his real name, Hans-Jürgen Gherke; I want to tell you, because he's dead now.
During the years that I was too young to help with the tree my mother decorated it all in blue and silver. She had two strings of blue lights, and two sets of blue glass bulbs; one set was round, about the size of a baseball. The others were long and pointy on each end, about the size of big dangly earrings. My dad would string the outdoor lights, which were also blue, along the eavestrough at the front of our white brick split-level, then run an extension cord out to the evergreen tree at the foot of the driveway, and string it, too. And there was one blue spotlight, placed at the foot of the birch tree in the middle of the lawn.
On the indoor tree my mother always used lots and lots of icicles. Those silver foil ones, remember the kind? She would carefully remove them from the packaging and hang them one at a time. She taught me how, a few years later. Never in clumps. Never
carelessly.
The Christmas I was five was the last year she decorated the tree without my help, and it was the last time it was all blue. The tree was a blue spruce, which made it all the more stunning. All those blue lights, and blue glass bulbs. A blue foil star on top. Nothing fancy, nothing frou-frou, just all those icicles.
I hated it, and I told her so. Why can't we have red and green and yellow lights like everybody else? And coloured balls? So the next year, we did. She bought a regular string of lights, like everyone else had. With alternating red, blue, green, and yellow lights. And she bought some new tree decorations. But she didn't get rid of the blue lights or bulbs, she just put them aside.
I have them now.
One year, in the 90s, when it was fashionable to do a Victorian style tree, with wooden decorations and strings of wooden cranberries, I did my tree all in blue, but I never told my mother. And I haven't put up a tree since the Christmas before she died, because I hate Christmas now.
I try to ignore it, and sometimes I think I'm doing a pretty good job, and then I decide that this year, I will find the courage to take the X's skates to Goodwill. The skates I once bought him for Christmas. And then I go into a Shoppers Drug Mart to pick up a few necessities, and I hear The Chipmunks Christmas song, and am reduced to tears.
I hate Christmas because it sucks to be alone. It sucks to be alone all the time, but never so much as when I'm surrounded by my family on Christmas Eve. And this year it sucks doubly, because the one person I want to not be alone with — no, wait, I mean I
want to be alone with. Oh, you know what I mean — would rather be alone.
Just a few more hours, then it'll be over.
It's been raining all day today; melted all the snow.
* * *In Chicago, Postmodern Sass discovers her roots, then rings in the New Year Hogmanay style, and chases the Christmas blues away.
There's a German pub just around the corner from Dave's apartment.
