The Lucid Millennial

Taking Down the Christmas Tree on Christmas Eve

Last week I came home from work and realized that I hate having my Christmas tree up. It doesn’t fit well in the space, and it is not just encroaching on the dog’s sleeping spots, it’s also seeping into the foundations of my emotional stability. So, I have decided that today, on Christmas Eve, I will be taking down my Christmas Tree. 

Christmas Past

When I was a kid, I loved Christmas. I remember one summer, sitting in my grandma’s living room with my younger brother playing video games, I excitedly exclaimed *gasp* “it’s almost time for school to start,” and then a bigger *GASP* “It’s almost Christmas!” My brother looked at me like I was crazy, but I always loved Christmas. 

Every year, on Christmas eve, Nonnie, my dad’s mom, would come over to our house, and I would help her make a family favorite meal: chicken and noodles. This recipe is an all day ordeal, even with several sets of hands working on it. It involves boiling chicken with celery and onion to make a broth, then breading and deep frying the chicken for a crispy finish, and making homemade noodles to later boil in the chicken broth with enough flour to turn it into a gravy. I think this was a recipe born of need from lack of funds and excess mouths to feed that Nonnie had to manage, particularly in the era where she was feeding a husband, three teenage boys (my dad was the middle of the three), and two young daughters. The meal doesn’t require much by way of ingredients, the noodles are made entirely of flour and eggs, and it is easy to cook in bulk, but the time consuming nature really made it a once a year type dish.

Nonnie would come over around noon and we’d start cooking immediately. Usually my dad and brother could be found sitting in the living room watching TV. Mom would help get out anything we needed and cook the chicken before disappearing to her room to watch TV or take a nap. Nonnie and I would work on the hand made noodles – the most time consuming part – and have good deep conversations about life and the world. Once dinner was ready, usually between 4pm and 6pm, we’d all sit together and eat in the kitchen, then move to the living room for our annual viewing of “A Christmas Story.”

After the movie, Nonnie would go home, and my brother and I would get sent to bed, but he’d quickly sneak into my room, and we’d watch Mary Poppins and Lady and the Tramp 2 before we’d get yelled at for being awake and he’d scurry back off to bed. There were never any presents out yet by then. 

I was usually the first one in the house awake on Christmas morning. Sometimes I’d get up at 5AM and just sit at the top of the stairs looking down at all the gifts. My parents weren’t very good with money, but they had quite a bit of it. Every year, our large tree was tucked back into the corner as far as it could go, and the presents would stretch from under the tree all the way out into the middle of the very large living room. I loved just having a few moments alone to soak it in. I learned from a very young age that if my brother wasn’t awake, it wasn’t time for presents, and my mom didn’t want me to wake him up, so I’d get him up first and then send him to go get my parents up.

He’d rush down the stairs, hardly stopping to look at the haul and pound on their bedroom door and then go sit in front of the pile looking for his name on as many gifts as he could see without touching them. While my parents slowly shuffled out of their room, I’d get my mom a diet coke from the garage, and my dad a caffeine free diet coke from the pantry, though he’d take his sweet time going to make coffee before we could start anyways – and a trash bag from under the sink. Then I’d peer into the stockings that were so heavy and over-stuffed they no longer hung on the hooks, but sat on the floor leaning against the front of the presents. It was relatively easy based on the contents to tell whose was whose, so I’d hand my mom hers, set my dads on his chair, push my brother’s into his hands, and scoot back to lean against the couch with mine. Mom always made us wait until dad got his coffee, and in earlier years finished his morning smoke, and was seated with us ready to open his stocking too before we could start. 

Pre-Christmas

While I always loved Christmas day, the month leading up to it included one of my least favorite activities: decorating. Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing Christmas decorations. I love walking into a space on December first and seeing it completely changed and made over. I love my little reindeer and penguin figures that I’ve accumulated this season, and I absolutely adore sitting alone in the light of the Christmas tree late in the night and reading a book, or thinking about life.

But the house I grew up in had vaulted ceilings. I’m talking like 18’ ceilings. The stairs up to the second floor were right next to the living room and the whole living room was open up to the second floor. Here’s some screenshots of the living room from the listing when my mom sold the house:

The tree always went in the back corner to the left of the fireplace. 

Now, I’m tall, I’m 6’ tall, but growing up, my mom had a 14’ Christmas tree. It was stored in 2 red canvas bags that were impressively heavy, and each year ripped a little more as I drug them up the stairs. Because Christmas tree assembly day was a lot like chicken and noodles cooking on Christmas eve, my dad and brother sat on the couch in the living room watching TV, and my mom laid in bed, also just watching TV, or she wandered around between the living room and the kitchen, telling me what else she needed me to bring up from the basement. The tree bags, each holding approximately 7’ of tree, were far too heavy for me to lift, so I’d grab the straps (inconveniently located in the middle of the bag) and slowly tug it backwards up the stairs, then go back down and start over with the second bag. 

Before I could start assembling the tree, I also had to bring up several other boxes containing ornaments, various nativity scenes, her little angel people statues – you know the ones I’m talking about, those Willow Tree ones that were super popular in the early 2000’s – the outdoor lights, the christmas village, the fake poinsettias, and the outdoor giant christmas bulbs she hung on the porch. 

Once I single handedly delivered Christmas from the basement, mom would bark at me to put up the Christmas tree. Because I am not, and never have been capable of reaching 14 feet in the air, I always assembled the tree right next to the stairs. The first few years I was sent to trudge through the snow to collect the ladder from the shed, despite my fear of heights, and when I dumped it in the garage a few hours later, with the extremely valid point that I would need it again in 3 weeks when she told me to take the tree down, I got yelled at for being lazy.

So, every black friday, I started by screwing the pegs loosely into the metal tree base, the dropped the bottom layer into the stand, and screwed it tight so it wouldn’t tip over when I inevitably had to slide it across the carpet to the “correct” spot in the living room. Once the tree was assembled, my mom would abandon the nativity scene she was setting up in favor of spreading the branches. She’d insist I spread the ones at the top because she couldn’t reach it, and it needed to be done immediately so that we could move the tree. 

I will say, it is ridiculous requests like this that helped develop my extreme efficiency. If you have to do stupid shit, you may as well do it in the easiest way possible.

That being said, this was a learned skill, and the first year I assembled the tree next to the stairs and moved it, I then had to go get the ladder anyways for my mom to spread the branches. The year after that, I waited until we spread the branches, but then we still needed the ladder to decorate the tree. From that point on, the tree did not move away from the stairs until it was fully decorated. Ever year, though, we had to have an argument about this. The argument was “surely the ornaments will fall off, and I don’t want my ornaments broken, they were expensive,” and the rebuttal, “no they wont, I will be careful.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking, I probably broke some ornaments, but I assure you I did not. The resulting punishment, whatever it was, was definitely not worth broken ornaments. So when the tree was finally assembled, and plugged in at each segment, and the branches were spread, and it was fully decorated all the way around – because we don’t believe in the “back of the tree” in this house – I would lay on my stomach under the tree as close to the base as I could get, and brace my feet against the wall, and slowly start sliding the tree across the living room. 

Now this was the point where my dad and brother finally got involved in the tree decorating process. Our living room had several orientations over the years we spent in that house, but the thing that every lay out had in common, was that I had to push the tree through the path between the couch, my dad’s chair, and the TV. I bet you’ve seen one of those super skinny tall trees that stretch up high but fit neatly in a corner? Well this wasn’t one of those. This tree was proportionately large. And from the time I started obstructing the view of the TV, it probably took me 10-15 minutes to get the tree fully out of the way. That’s like half an episode of Star Trek or Two and a Half Men! How dare I! So when I say this is when they got involved, what I mean is, they started yelling at me to get out of the way. 

The Shift

Those well loved traditions continued until I finished college. I think 2018 was probably the first year that Nonnie didn’t come over for Christmas eve. She was aging and tired and the steps and the travel were getting harder for her every year. In 2019, Christmas really blew up. In August that year, my mom told me she was going to file for divorce, and on December 1st, the divorce was finalized. The court gave my dad until December 31st to move out, and in a fit of pure spite, he stayed that whole time. A few months prior, my mom moved to my brothers old bedroom (we’d both moved out by then), and my dad posted a “help wanted” sign on the bedroom door. 

My parents agreed in front of the kids, me and two younger brothers now, one of whom was 7, that they would not be getting each other gifts. As a young kid, I often remembered feeling bad at Christmas because my brother and I had way more gifts than my parents did, and I didn’t want my younger brother to have to experience that in the extreme while the constant fighting was going on in the house he lived in, so I spent way more money than I had on both parents to make sure they had enough gifts to open. Christmas morning my mom pulled me into her closet and showed me a plastic bag with gifts she’d gotten for my dad. She said “just incase he got me something, I got him something.” He did not get her anything, and I told her that. I knew the real goal here was to make him look like an asshole. But I tell ya what, everyone that wasn’t me was an asshole that year.

2020 had its obvious problems, but as a primarily “religious and republican family” I was invited to and expected to attend several Christmas parties. I didn’t have any clue how to do boundaries yet, cut me a break. I’m better now.

Christmas Now

I’ll share another blog post eventually that talks about how and why I cut contact with my mother, but here we’re just focusing on Christmas. I cut contact with my mom in August of 2023. Christmas last year was extremely difficult, and this year is proving to be pretty similarly hard. Despite the fact that I am the one that cut contact because of the bad interactions, there were still some particularly good interactions, especially around Christmas time, and I again this year, find myself grieving those things. Despite how much I hated getting out and putting up all of my mom’s decorations, I realize in hindsight that I really loved the structure of it. I knew what to expect. There were traditions that I could cling to. Even if they weren’t particularly pleasant ones, they still helped establish a sense of belonging. My place was at the bottom of the totem pole, but I had a place I belonged. 

I no longer get to ask “what time is Christmas dinner? Whose house is it at?” This is a luxury that comes with time and repetition and tradition and love. And while I often feel more loved here in Maryland than I ever did in Michigan, I have not integrated this deeply with anyone yet. I do generally get an invite to some events, and it has seemed to be from a different person each year, which adds to the chaos. I am so unbelievably grateful to the people who have included me in their family events and traditions, however the lack of consistency year after year continues to breed a grief for a lack of structure.

So the tree?

Right, the tree! Today, I am going to take down my average sized 6’ christmas tree and instead put up this tiny 3-4’ one that I got at Home Goods my first year here in Maryland. The bigger tree that I have had up all month is serving as this very large reminder of all the things that I don’t get to do this year. I do not get to make chicken and noodles with Nonnie, I don’t get to watch A Christmas Story with my family, I don’t get to have a nice Christmas eve dinner with people I love and care about. I don’t get to walk up on Christmas morning to a living room full of gifts or an overly stuffed stocking. I don’t get to eat breakfast with my mom’s family at my grandma’s house. I don’t get to be so busy celebrating with people that I forget how difficult things have been lately. Instead, I am sitting here, writing this blog post, and eating a salad that is probably a little too old for me to continue eating.

I only had the little tree up my first year here because it was quick and easy, and I wasn’t going to be around for Christmas, I drove back to Michigan in 2021. In 2022, I stayed here, but I kept the little tree up because I hadn’t bought a big one yet, and I really liked the vibe of the little one. Last year, I finally splurged and got the bigger tree and some decorations to put on it, but having cut contact, the idea that I will never get to see any of my hand made childhood ornaments again is really hurting my heart. Last year I bought the tree and put it up and decorated it, but then I got rats in my apartment and I had to move before Christmas, and I never put the bigger one up again.

I think there are just so many unpleasant memories and reminders attached to the bigger tree, that waking up to the little one tomorrow is going to make me feel better. 

How are you all dealing with the holidays?

Feel free to reach out if you need someone to talk to!

Tata~

Meagan