Once, in my sixth grade home ec (‘economics’) class, we were assigned to write down our family traditions. Images of family trips to the lake house, holidays with grandparents, and Friday-night pizza dinners quickly filled my mind. There was only one problem: while these are nice traditions seen in movies, none of these were actually mine. I just couldn’t think of any. Perhaps as an immigrant family we really did lack traditions, or maybe I couldn’t recall them in the moment, but no actual traditions were coming to me.
Except one.
We always set up our Christmas tree the weekend after Thanksgiving.
Not an earth-shattering tradition, but it was one I had come to relish and looked forward to as the holiday months approached. For many years, it involved the same plastic tree we always had, nearly as old as I was until we replaced it sometime in high school. We continually held off buying a new one in part because most of the new ones had built-in lights, removing part of the fun of decorating. Each year, we opened the same box of ornaments - little wooden mice for some reason, plastic colored balls with a weird thread-like texture, a lumber jack toy that would move its arms when you pulled down on the string, a paint-filled lightbulb I made in elementary school, etc - only adding one or two new ones every couple of years.
The tree itself was no more than five feet tall and thinned a bit more each year as another batch of green plastic needles fell off. When we moved to our new house, we started setting up the tree in the front window, a way to make up for the lack of outside decorations that every other house seemed to have. However, we soon noticed driving by all the other houses that every tree seemed to tower in the windows, clearly taking up the full height of the room. To make up for this, we put our tree on a cardboard box and covered the box with a tree skirt. No one would be the wiser.
Finally when the tree was setup, we’d play Christmas music from the one Christmas CD we had and we’d plug it in. Standing back, we would admire our work and the holiday season would have officially begun.
These days, the tradition lives on in the form of our tiny, 2 1/2 feet tall tree I got from Target a few years ago. Like most of its contemporaries, it has lights built in, but we’ve taken to adding a string of colored lights to add to the white lights it already has. We have only a handful of ornaments, and it only takes a few minutes to set everything up, but it is still an important part of the season.
I’ve come to see the tree as almost an embodiment of who I am. Much like an advent calendar, the tree signals something to look forward to. It marks the start of something exciting. Hardly exciting myself, this is how I’ve come to mark the passing of time. In school it was the next event or the next break. Now, it is the next holiday, trip or maybe even goal. “What’s the next thing to look forward to?” my dad would ask when I was younger, a question I’ve repurposed and asked myself.
At the same time, the tree itself is extremely nostalgic. The ornaments we have are from trips or significant life events. Our first ornament is a little wooden toy kiwi bird from our honeymoon in New Zealand. There is a ceramic orb from Mexico and a little Nintendo keychain from Japan, the last ornament we acquired as that trip was right before Covid shut everything down. There are a few others.
Our little Christmas tree. A time capsule of memories opened each year, a moment to look forward to and the unofficial start of the Christmas season.
