I met an acquaintance from the gym at Home Depot. He was buying a Christmas tree; I was buying duct tape to repair a sudden ceiling collapse in the garage. I believe that you can repair anything with duct tape, but you have to use lots of it; consequently there was a fair amount of duct tape in my cart. The guy looked briefly into my cart and told me that the Christmas trees were really fresh this year. And then he said, “Do you put up a holiday tree?”
This politically correct question annoyed me; I may be a lapsed Catholic and paranoid agnostic (“What if the nuns were right after all?”) but my tree is still a ‘Christmas’ tree, and I said so. The guy nodded. “What’s your theme this year?” he asked. Now I was really annoyed. “My theme is ‘Christmas’” I said shortly.
Since when do Christmas trees need “themes?” I’ve seen theme trees of course, like the “Mickey Mouse Tree” at the Disney Store or the “Yankees Tree” I saw in a sports bar in New York. But, as I loaded more duct tape in my cart, I reflected that even though I’ve never had a theme tree, I have had several Christmases with themes.
For example, the theme of my first (and only) Christmas as a Broward County school teacher was “Poverty.” I was as broke as I’ve ever been and I took a job moonlighting as a waiter at Bennigan’s, where, in the ultimate humiliation, I often waited on my students and their parents. There was no money for Christmas decorations that year, so I decorated a threadbare artificial tree with cookies, cranberries and popcorn, and was rewarded with a Biblical plague of roaches, rats and ants.
Several years later when I was 30 the theme of my Christmas was “Depression.” I had just gone through a traumatic break-up and the company I was working for went belly-up; I could not find another job, so it looked like I was going to have to move back in with my mother. My Christmas wish list that year was ambitious: I wanted a steady job, a stable relationship and a secure roof over my head. My practical family, however, thought that a practical gift would cheer me up, so my mother and all 4 of my siblings chipped in and got me a really good vacuum cleaner. This did not raise my spirits.
The theme of Christmas, 2007 was “Grief.” That was the year that, through ghastly coincidence, five close family members died between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I put up a tree that year, and the family somehow went through the holiday rituals, not because of any pretense of joy but mainly out of a desperate need to have some level of normalcy.
So what’s my theme for 2011? Well, everyone who was here for Christmas last year is still among the living. Unlike many of my friends, I’m on good terms with all my siblings, the vacuum incident having been long forgiven, if not forgotten. My cholesterol levels are still fine, without medication, despite my compulsive need to eat ice cream every night before bed. I’ve got the steady job and the stable relationship I asked for well over twenty years ago, and I have a secure roof over my head.
Just then my partner called to tell me that some more of the garage ceiling had just collapsed. Smiling, I decided that my theme for this Christmas will be “Thanksgiving” and I went to get more duct tape.