Our story

My mother has always been enthusiastic about holidays. By "enthusiastic," I mean decorate our entire two-acre woods house lot to the nines, even though we'd get minimal trick-or-treaters. Each time that doorbell rang, though, mom had a full basket of goodie bags closed up with purple ribbon, full of Reese's, Kit Kats, and Tootsie Pops. (The good stuff.) At Christmas she meticulously counted each stairway spindle - twice - to center the faux garland wound tight with small rainbow lights perfectly from one end of the handrail to the other. I never understood why she didn't just write the number down for future references until I got to the age where you begin to see your parents as people, not just mom and dad. And I saw mom as a person who found joy in tradition, the little things, and creating a sense of comfort for her family. 

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Our Christmas tree lights matched the garland. It always had this aura about it like when there's a light behind a kitten, making this fuzzy, soft, pure energy. Mom always picked the biggest tree we would let her, which was "just right" despite always ending up to be too chubby and too tall. She made my dad rotate it about 100 times until it looked just right in the living room corner. He stood with patience every time, even as we rolled our eyes at each other while mom shook apart the branches to fluff its boughs. Each ornament was selected one-by-one. She made up for not remembering the number of stairway spindles by remembering exactly which ornament was in which box. Most of the boxes were hanging on by a thread, duct taped together with her cursive "Christmas" Sharpied across the old shoebox logos. The rainbow tree lights were the last thing to get turned off at bedtime. Mom would get on her knees and crawl behind the tree in her flannel snowflake PJ pants (which got nightly use, even in the summer) unplugging the lights as the unspoken finale of the day. 

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You can imagine how much it hurt her heart when it was time to throw the tree on the brush pile then. RIP, holiday cheer. The living room got re-arranged to its normal blueprint and suddenly the living room felt bland and flat. One year mom decided to fight back against the boring, though, after "making a major score" at our local Marden's: A 4-foot, hot pink, white-lighted artificial Christmas tree, crammed right to hell in its box. We thought it was a joke at first; we all had a good laugh at how cute it was. That tree was up through to Valentine's Day, though - Then until St. Patrick's Day; Easter; the Fourth of July; Halloween; and Thanksgiving, until it had its sweet meeting of Christmas. Christmas meant it was time for another green chubby tree, though, and all the real estate in the living room was taken. Seasonal priorities shook out, and the pink tree got booted to the hallway upstairs, anchoring the garland's rainbow lights with its soft, white lights. 

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And that's how I became emotionally attached to a pink pine tree. Home is where the heart is, especially when you were chucked into every extracurricular under the sun. Out of all of them, though, arts and crafts stuck the most. Christmas always brought art kits and craft supplies "from Santa," which I'd rip apart over the remainder of school's holiday vacation. (She still has many of my childhood masterpieces tacked to the basement wall.)

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Thanks for visiting.

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