As I got older, things shifted. I lost that sense of home, except in the part of it that I carried with me from those more innocent times. Some of them were spent alone, some of them hungry, some of them in darker places than I, thankfully, had known back then. Lately, it seems that we’ve forgotten that the holidays are meant to be a time to bring us closer together, to show us the best of humanity. Instead, we seem to focus on the worst of it, the baser aspects of greed, envy and intolerance.
Even in these times, maybe more so now, I hold to the memories of better days to protect me from the cynicism that seems to have overtaken us. I remember the goodness in people, in what my grandma used to call the Christmas spirit, though I’ve seen it in celebrants of all faiths, and in those of none. This is one of the most valuable of those and it’s the only gift this humble wordsmith can give to you.
When I was very young, still in primary school, my mom and I had a particularly rough year. The economy was still recovering from the oil crash of ’86 and she’d been working long days as a waitress to make ends meet. Because I’d grown up never really having much, and because she was a better mother than she gives herself credit for being, I didn’t really understand until much later how bad it was.
During winter break, and most others, I stayed with my grandparents and only went home for my mom’s days off. They had their tree up when I arrived. It was plastic, but beautiful, as my grandma was fantastic at that sort of thing. My mom and I, though, had a tradition of getting and decorating a real tree every year. What we lacked in material things, she was always able to make up for and more with love, making the little time we got mean more to me than anything else she could have given me, and that was one of our big ones. To this day, the smell of a real tree evokes traces of that peaceful, blissful time in my life.
For weeks, since the drive home from Thanksgiving, I’d been bugging my mom for a Christmas tree, as it was one of those things we’d always had. I didn’t realize that the reason we didn’t was because we could barely afford to pay the bills and what little was left over she’d been putting towards my present for months prior. There was just no money for a tree.
A few days before Christmas, the night before I was due home, she went to put the last payment on my gift and stock the fridge. When all was said and done, she found herself with just over five dollars to her name, standing in the little family-run tree lot off of Ridge, near where they’d put up a K-Mart years later. There were a bunch of families and the attendants were working like crazy to keep up with the last minute rush as she walked from tree to tree, finding even the smallest of them to cost four and five times what she had.
When the old man who ran the lot came up to her and asked if he could help her, she broke down in tears, explaining our situation, why the tree was as important as it was. She finished in tears. The man, for his part, listened patiently to her story, never rushing her or excusing himself to deal with another customer. He didn’t speak until the end, when he asked her how much she had. When she told him she only had five dollars left, but she would take anything he could give her for it, he just nodded and said he’d see what they had.
She watched him walk to the trees in the back, find a small, full, beautiful tree. He tore off the price tag, not even bothering to look at it, and brought it back to her, telling her that she was in luck, because they had one more five dollar tree. She thanked him profusely and he just waved it away, saying that she’d paid for the tree. He even helped her load it onto the car.
When I got home the next morning, it was sitting on the coffee table, its wide branches having spread thick and gorgeous overnight. I was thoroughly overjoyed and we spent the whole of the morning decorating it together. Of all the trees I’ve had in my thirty-one years, that’s one of only two that I can remember with perfect clarity.
This is the season for miracles. It sounds trite, I know, but it’s true. It’s a time to remember that, no matter how heavy things may seem, or how dark the horizon, there is still within every person the capability for a deep and abiding goodness. When someone wishes you a happy holiday, a merry Christmas or a happy Hanukkah, accept it for what it is, the best of them reaching out to the best in you, carrying with it all the love and peace that all of us once knew and which still, somewhere, rests in our hearts.
What a beautiful memory, thanks for sharing it Zach.
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