Got my glasses back on Friday. Friday was my day off but I had a haircut mid-morning and it was snowing the snow that, according to Todd, was not called for. There are many times where I don’t follow the weather forecasts until someone at work says something like, “I wonder if we’ll even be open tomorrow?” and then I’m all, wait, what? And that’s when I tell Todd and he’s all, “weather.com doesn’t show anything.” Really? I say, because they said it’s going to snow in the Baltimore/DC area and we might get some too.

I digress. I mean, I could go on to add that my dad is also a weather guru (insert “air quotes”) apparently because he is always telling me about weather that no one, not anyone, has forecasted on any platform I’ve seen. So I’m forever questioning his sources. But sometimes he’s right.

Anyhoo. I left the hair salon and was like, I don’t feel like driving up there. Maybe I’ll just go next week after work. And then I thought, but I’ll be in a different office 2-1/2 days next week which will complicate matters. Oh fuck it, I’ll just go now. So I did. (Yes, I argue with myself like this on the daily.)

The optician started talking the holidays and that led to a conversation about live versus fake Christmas trees. She will always get a live tree, it’s a tradition, plus their friends own a tree farm (should’ve gotten the name of the tree farm but you know, hindsight). She looked up fake trees and the only one she said she might agree to was a $1200 tree that smells real. I don’t know, for that price it maybe should unfold itself like George Jetson’s briefcase-car.

I felt a bit of shy embarrassment when I admitted that we have a fake tree but quickly added that it’s always been a live tree for me too, until two years ago when we bought a fake tree. I justified it as, we couldn’t find a tree anywhere even in the first week of December. And we just stuck with it, since I love to leave the tree up as long as possible. We buy Frazier Fir-scented candles on Amazon.

I will admit I considered picking up a live tree and also setting up the fake tree and also the other fake tree I bought for the basement. This pencil tree for the basement I purchased in 2021 to replace the one we’d lent to my mom to put up on the restaurant’s tented and heated patio for the holiday season in 2020. That tree was lost in the collapse of the pavilion (where everything gets stored that is not in use) after a heavy snowfall in early 2021 that also claimed her relatively new car. Anyway, I never put up the pencil tree. I wasn’t exactly in the most festive of moods between 2021 and 2024. But that’s another story for another post (not).

So the optician was telling me about her family’s live tree tradition and how her mom had this cardboard fireplace she’d put up every year. In her adult life she has gas fireplaces but someone bought her a cardboard fireplace couple of years ago and she said it’s silly but she absolutely loves it. It’s a nostalgic piece of her childhood that she holds dear and I love that for her, this person I just met and had a real human interaction with.

Sidebar: I’ve been thinking about how to be a kinder person – not that I’m not kind and I’m certainly WAY more outgoing with just about anybody than I was even 15 years ago – but to actually SEE people and engage with them, even if it’s just while we’re picking over pajama sets in Costco. I made a point to ask the optician her name and wished her a Merry Christmas. I’ve spent so many years not bothering with that small detail and it feels so disingenuous.

The whole thing made me nostalgic for my childhood holidays. I was a child of divorce and I had a happy childhood. I’m aware that those two complete sentences joined by a conjunction do not belong together. I was lucky…I got to have two Christmases and two Thanksgivings, etc. Christmas morning with mom and then dad would pick me up and take me to Nana’s house.

The LIVE cut Christmas trees: mom’s was tall and majestic, wrapped in colored lights and gold garland. Dad preferred the fat Douglas Fir, long thin, wispy branches. I don’t remember how it was decorated. Nana’s tree was wide and proud like a stout old lady, draped in tinsel and colored lights and – I think – those lights that bubbled like water inside.

Sidebar: mom went on a balled live tree kick for a couple of years so that thing got rolled out after the holidays and planted in the yard with a homemade tin tag on it with the year. (Mom was always doing artsy stuff, like making stained glass and tin-working.) It was probably one of these trees that was allowed to stay in -and FULLY decorated – until Valentine’s Day when my date picked me up and it was all over school the following Monday.

Dinner at Nana’s: We ate dinner at the expanded kitchen table where my uncles would hike dinner rolls to each other and my aunt Paula would unbutton her pants halfway though the meal. Pop-pop would carve the turkey with an electric carving knife (I can still hear the sound of it). One year Nana lost control of the turkey on its way out of the oven and it skidded across the floor. We ate it anyway.  

Another year she reheated the mashed potatoes in her new microwave and melted the saran wrap on top of it. Aunt Paula and I didn’t notice as we picked the “crust” off the top and ate it. To be fair, before the microwave she would always put the mashed potatoes in the oven to keep warm, whereby it would crust over the top, which we loved. I can still hear Nana’s gasp as she realized this. Her years-of-smoking sharp intake of air is something I can call up at any time, just like her smoker’s laugh.

After, we’d all move to the basement for TV and pool. Nana would take up her position behind the bar and light a cigarette and the vanilla candle and pour herself a Canadian Windsor.

Later, I’d return home and my mom’s side of the family was gathered around the dining room table and I’d have turkey, part two. Maybe a glass of wine (because alcohol was not a big deal in my family). This side of my family was also loud, and drunk, and far more rated R than my dad’s side.

Other traditions:

Nana’s cookie-baking day and we’d descend on the house to decorate the cut-out cookies and eat cookies until we’d explode. She stored them in old pretzel tins that people pay $$$ for at flea markets and ebay.

Mom’s favorite cookie – an apricot cookie – she made every year and in recent years I got the recipe from the OG and surprised her with them. She recently said she’d like two dozen this year.

I got to pick one gift from the stocking on Christmas Eve.

Bailey’s Irish Cream. Had my first taste of it at Nana’s bar, when I was 15.

Let’s not forget Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Year Without a Santa Claus, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and A Charlie Brown Christmas. It’s a Wonderful Life. My aunt, Candy, loves Miracle on 34^th Street so that was also in the rotation every year at Nana’s. We weren’t really A Christmas Story family on either side so I was a full-on adult before I watched it and even so I don’t think I’ve ever seen it all in one sitting. (I would still buy the lamp for my front window, though.)

I bought my first Christmas tree and ornaments when I was about 24. After I had my kids, we’d go buy the tree and each pick out a new ornament. I wanted to do my own cookie-baking day like Nana used to, but V’s diabetes diagnosis depressed and overwhelmed me. I eventually did start doing it, but it wasn’t on the same scale. I have all the cutters from mom.

I started my own tradition years later of watching Love Actually on Christmas Eve with a glass-es of wine and wrapping presents by myself. It was the best night of my life before the divorce – to be left alone and at peace for just a few hours. I don’t do that anymore.  I don’t need that anymore.

This year, just like my decision to be more present with people, I will focus on a handful of things that bring me joy and little stress. The mantle is decorated and Nana’s ceramic Christmas tree, the one I coveted for years, is in my living room and throwing its warm light over me. The fake tree is up with lights on but the ornaments are still in the boxes. I’ll get to it today. Todd thinks he wants to outline the house in lights. Stay tuned.

Maybe I’ll try some new traditions this year and toast the childhood ones. I’m starting with sending out holiday cards, which I haven’t done in YEARS. So long I don’t even remember the last time. I asked friends to send me their addresses. I’ve got a list but I’m about to send out a last call this week.

What are some of your memories and traditions?

TL:DR – random conversation about childhood Christmases led to slide down memory lane. Fake vs Live Christmas trees. Holiday traditions and the memories that stay warm and fuzzy for a lifetime. My fake trees and I’m not sorry. Looking to be more present and engaged with the world going forward. Sending out Christmas Holiday cards for the first time in a decade (we think).

^^^ I’m going to try on this new feature of my posts since I’m very wordy and I go on and on (just ask Todd) and maybe some of ya’ll just want a 30-second synopsis.