A Christmas Tree Tragedy

It’s happening in slow motion

This has been a year of shifting boxes and totes. We have moved some out of the space above the garage into our basement; we have lugged others from the basement to the local thrift store or the transfer station; we have filled them with family history and stored them on the third floor; and we have had some delivered from my aunt’s former apartment right back into our garage.

No matter where we shift them, our life remains filled with boxes and totes. Some of them hold objects that we can’t bring ourselves to throw away, though they have no apparent future use (elementary school report cards and outgrown soccer team jerseys fall into this category). Others store items that have a theoretical use but aren’t in regular rotation, like craft supplies and old electronics (I think of these as “just-in-case” boxes). Some totes are strictly practical, providing overflow storage for things like winter coats, and some are purely aspirational (old college notes and writing journals). We do have special boxes, ones that are full of memories yet also accessed at least once a year. We call them “seasonal,” but actually they are timeless. It’s where we keep things like Thanksgiving table linens, buckets for Easter egg hunts, and advent wreaths.

Recently we discovered that we are missing one of these boxes. We are missing the box that contains all of our Christmas ornaments.

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I can’t think that it is truly lost. Where would it have gone? It couldn’t have been mistaken for anything but itself, stuffed to the top as it was with tissue-wrapped packages of every shape and size. Since none of us would have deliberately removed it, we can only believe that it is still here somewhere and will turn up.

Operating on that assumption, we went ahead and cut down our tree on Sunday, and brought out the other Christmas tote. It’s full of memories too, so we have some of our holiday touchstones. These include a pair of old gray wool bootsocks with red cuffs, used for my boys’ stockings just as my sisters and I used them for ours. We have the two Nutcrackers that stand at attention on the mantel (one wields a Minecraft sword, which replaced the original weapon when it snapped off a few years ago). There are clip-in birds for our wreaths, a homemade felt advent calendar, and candles for the windows. We even have a few basics for the tree: the tree-topper star that my husband and I sewed from a pillowcase for our first apartment, several strings of white lights, and the red brocade cloth I always put under the tree-stand. We just…don’t have ornaments.

It’s a strange feeling to come home in the evening and smell the tree, to turn on its lights to shine at passers-by through our window, but to see no twinkles of reflected light from dangling ornaments. What strange breed of Christmas tree is this? It doesn’t feel fully ours yet. How can it belong to our family without our memories festooning its branches?

The ornaments might remain lost for this entire holiday, though I can hardly believe that. Surely one of us will suddenly have a revelation. I will slap the table and say, “Of course! Don’t you remember, we put them outside under the porch for safekeeping!” or “We brought them over to your parents’ house last January to make some room!” The unspoken horror, of course, is the possibility that they are just gone forever.

What would such a loss even mean? Each year as we pack them away, we practically will ourselves to forget individual ornaments, simply for the pleasure of rediscovering them come December. Now I find myself wondering how many I could call to mind if pressed. If I had the power to conjure an ornament into being simply by picturing it clearly in my mind’s eye, how many could I save from oblivion? It’s a terrible, guilt-laden train of thought, implying as it does that we haven’t misplaced a box, but instead willfully erased decades of family memories. Still, images run through my mind:

• Wooden dinosaurs, painted black and orange years ago by our preschoolers

• A crystal tree engraved with a year and “Baby’s First Christmas”

• A plastic Dunkin’ Donuts box

• A raccoon and fox, both in felted wool (one given to each boy)

• A clay circle with a doodle of our old cat Benjamin scratched in

• Antique glass bells from my husband’s grandmother

• A red cloth clock with a green and white striped mouse at its base (my own first ornament)

• Yarn-wrapped photos of the boys, made as elementary school projects

• Felt hobby horses, designed to hold candy canes

• A TinTin keychain, converted to an ornament by my husband for our first shared Christmas tree

There are too many more to list. There are too many more to remember.

There are too many to lose forever.

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As tragedies go, this one is minor. We have our family, we have our memories, and quite probably we still have our ornaments (somewhere). If this Christmas is fated to be ornament-less, we will just appreciate our tree for itself. We will smell its green pine-y smell, let its lights glow before sunrise and after sunset, and watch the cats stalk each other under its lowest branches. It will still look glorious on Christmas morning, covered with candy canes and twinkling above the presents we give each other.

I imagine that I’ll think of this tree in years to come. When we pull out our ornament box, I will remember how we appreciated this particular tree for its own beauty. I will remember that, even without the ornaments, our memories were enough.