Oh Christmas Tree

Now, the season is upon us—the time of year we are invited to bring trees into our homes. It's a ritual I returned to late in life, but one I'm grateful to embrace again.

My tree isn’t adorned with ornaments, imbued with memory, waiting to be unwrapped, admired, and cherished year after year. Instead, I hold the season in my bones and the tissues of my skin.

For almost 22 years, I didn’t have a tree at all because when I was married, I converted to Judaism and made a promise not to celebrate Christmas in our house. It was an agreement I came to regret—one that became an indelible stain upon my marriage.

I know I really meant it at the time, and in the beginning, when we were both students and had less money to buy and less room to store an array of ornaments, it was easy.

But then, we had children, and my promise became more complicated.

Suddenly, "the season" began to feel like a runaway train I boarded each year after Thanksgiving. Something to endure more than looked forward to—something I had no control over as to how or if I could participate until the train came to a screeching halt on New Year's Day. Hannukah in our house, followed by Christmas at my parent's house. Eight days of presents followed by one day of even more presents. My kids thought it was uh-may-zing!!

I couldn't tell you exactly what was missing, but I knew the entire arrangement didn't ring true.

It's not that I regretted my promise per se, and it's not that I ever wanted to raise our children as anything other than Jewish, but I didn't understand why we couldn't have a Christmas tree, too, or at least reconsider the conversation.

One year, I joked about buying a tree and leaving it strapped atop my Volvo station wagon for the whole month of December, but of course, that wasn't the point.

For years, I didn't know what to do with my lack of Christmas, especially when I stopped drinking and began to see everything in my life with new clarity. For the first four years after I got sober, I literally left the country:

India

Israel

Japan

Argentina

But I could not run away.

Conversion, if it means anything, means more than one thing. It's a process, and a conversation. It is an embrace of the possibility of change and future. It is a difficult companion. It is a rewarding companion. It calls us again and again throughout life.¹

We finally did have a tree, but it was a last-ditch "save the marriage" tree, and it wasn't enough. By then, the marriage was beyond repair. In the sixth year of my sobriety, my husband and I were separated, awaiting the judge to sign our divorce papers. I had a tree with my kids in our new house, and it finally felt like I was coming home.

Having a tree has nothing to do with religion, at least it doesn’t for me. Rather, it is a way to commune and communicate with nature—it is a wordless sensory experience.

Every Christmas, whenever I encounter my tree, I inhale deeply. And in the silence, the cedar scent is a reminder of why we bring trees into our homes and how we live in the forests of ourselves.

I see it on my winter walks. Daily circles of reflection to return and consider the many ways that if my life were a song, I have always taken the long way around and slowly found my way home:

to what I am rooted

to what I return

to what greets me in the constancy of change

Naturalist Anna Botsford Comstock (1854-1930) observed that winter is the best time for learning to tell trees apart from each other. How to discern, and inevitably fall in love with, different species.

As I look skyward, I am in awe of the skeletal elegance of trees stripped bare, yet their branches still soar skywards like fragile lungs.

to fall in love

to inhale all that is my life

If we are born wonder-stricken by the glory of nature ~ it can only be so, for we ourselves are living wonders, sentient somethings against the staggering odds of nothingness ~ and yet we so readily relinquish this natural bond at the altar of a culture that tells us what it means to grow up. This loss might be our great primal wound.

Maria Popova

But we have a choice.

We can apply a salve.

We can heal our wounds.

We can bring a tree into our home.

Even if just for a few weeks.

My conversion may have cost me 22 years of Christmas, but it ultimately gave me the courage to confront and change. It was the price I needed to pay to know that I only ever needed to be myself.

whatever it is you choose to celebrate I wish you days of wonder and delight. thanks for reading ~ xosew

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1. Padraig O Tuama