It’s that time of year again, and I’m [thinking of you,
wondering how you’ve been, trying to remember who you are, wondering who will
show up and read this.] We’ve had a
[trying, amazing, expensive, humbling, brilliant, near-suicidally boring] year.
It’s amazing how time flies.
Each year at this time, we engage in familiar holiday traditions
[/rituals /obsessions /mind-numbing tasks.]
It all begins with our traditional Thanksgiving dinner, at which every
detail is an exact replica of Thanksgiving dinners past, from our last-minute inability
to find the matching crystal salt and pepper shakers [and our discovery anew
that the latter is broken, upon which we return it to the cabinet shelf and
pull out the little rectangular metal McCormick’s pepper can for placement on
the holiday table] to the dinner table conversation.And by “dinner table conversation,” I don’t mean that we generally tend to discuss similar topics from year to year; I mean that we have the exact same conversation, word for word, syllable by syllable, as last year [and the year before that, and the year before that…] An elderly family member kicks it all off upon entering our front door, with the words “What time are we going home?” Yes, the Gould family Thanksgiving dinner is a scene from “Groundhog Day.”
And that’s just the beginning.
When we moved to
this semi-rural town many years ago, our children were very young. We thought it was a cool idea to go to one of
the several Christmas Tree Farms in town, and “cut our own.” There’s a ritual associated with this. One does not just arrive at the farm wielding
a chainsaw, and go for it. It’s much
more civilized than that. Rather, while
still digesting that wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, we'd visit the Tree Farm to
select the family tree, and “tag” it, essentially reserving it. A couple of weeks later, closer to Christmas,
we'd return to the farm to claim our tagged tree, and the fine gentleman who runs
the place would drive his rusting Dodge pickup truck, with fuzzy reindeer antlers
affixed to the side-view mirrors, through the muck (it’s always raining on tree
pick-up day – that’s part of the tradition) to the tree site, fell it with his
buzz-saw, plop it into the truck and bring it to the front “office” [a tiny outbuilding
resembling a sugar shack, complete with pot-bellied stove ablaze] where we'd pay
and go happily on our way. The kids and dogs always came along, and seemed to enjoy it. How wonderful
to live in such bucolic surroundings, where such a quaint New England tradition
still lives on.
But… as years have passed, the experience has become less
and less enjoyable. For one thing, tree-tagging
has evolved into a blood sport. The day
after Thanksgiving? Fuhgeddaboutit… all the “good”
trees have been claimed by then. Not
only claimed, but decorated on-site, so ornately as to appear to have been
visited by Martha Stewart herself (which I understand would have been physically
impossible, given that she had taken up residence in the Pokey during much of
the time period in question.) And there
were we, showing up a month late and a dollar short, with nothing more than our
empty plastic gallon milk container, a Sharpie, and a roll of duct tape to make
“our” tree easily identifiable within the forest.
Twenty years ago, that approach was de rigueur… but, as with
everything else in our little slice of exurban paradise, the stakes have been
continually raised. To wit, our friendly
proprietor, Dodge pickup-guy, has gradually increased the price of a
freshly-cut tree at a steady pace – roughly equivalent to the pace at which
houses out here seem to sprout additional rooms and wings and such. Last year, my wife and I - our children
having long since lost all interest in participating - found ourselves trudging
through the mud with our elderly dogs, minds still addled and bellies still swollen from our
turkey-day festivities, in search of a tree – ANY tree that had more stage
presence than the object of Linus’ affection in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” We completed the ritual, but I think we both
sensed a turning point. This whole thing
was just not worth it anymore. This year, we’ve made the bold decision to switch things up. Change does not come easily in this household, in case you haven’t inferred the obvious quite yet. Yesterday, we went to a familiar big-box store and purchased a cheap, already-cut Christmas tree. I’m aware that this thing was most likely severed from its life source back in July, trucked down from some forlorn, deforested corner of Nova Scotia on a flatbed tandem trailer with about 5,000 of its brethren, and that it will likely spill its remaining needles by Wednesday. I don’t care. It was cheap, and it smells good. I’m actually quite proud that we’ve deferred the ultimate concession to practicality – buying an artificial tree – a bit longer.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been the greeting card writer in this household. Each year during the holiday season, I sit amidst several boxes of cards, list at hand, trying to come up with something unique and appropriate for each person or family with whom we exchange cards. For the past several years, I’ve experienced an increasing sense of [futility, redundancy, silliness] as I’ve gone through the motions of printing address labels, scribbling vapid content, and affixing stamps to snail-mail greetings meant for people with whom I interact much more frequently through social media and/or e-mail. Not that any of this has ever been insincere; it has just grown to seem so… pointless. So, I set about exploring alternatives. There are “e-card” sites these days, at which one can find, well, e-cards; most of these seem to involve some sort of multimedia presentation of holiday cheer – music, blinking lights, dancing reindeer; I developed a headache after viewing the first three or four. Nah. Not for me. I have decided, dear reader, to go commando. And so:
If you are still reading this, you are among the faithful. I hope you will understand why we’ve decided to go electronic with our conveyance of holiday cheer. We’re making exceptions, of course, for the elderly [or ultra-sensitive or long-lost-and-possibly-dead] relatives for whom we have no e-mail address or other electronic means of contact. We could point out how “green” we’re being, but that would be a tad hypocritical for people who just, once again, murdered a Douglas Fir to display in our family room (though technically, I think we may get more 'green cred' this year than in the past, seeing as how the tree was already on the flatbed long before our decision to purchase… but I digress.)
So, from our home to yours, we wish you and your loved ones a very Merry Christmas [/Happy Hanukkah / Kwanzaa / Festivus / Holiday / Weekend] and all the best in the coming year.
With love,
The Gould Family
Same to you!
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