Mtr Mary Trainor
Dear friend,
I got a Christmas tree this year. Big deal, a regular person might say. But it is a big deal for me as it is only the second Christmas tree of my adulthood.
The tree is seven feet tall, narrow in girth, and tucks nicely into one corner of my apartment, where its lights can be seen by passersby from different sets of windows. On its top is a large, illuminated star that pleases me beyond my understanding.
As I read the Gospel for Christmas Day, I wonder if my delight with my star is in any way akin to the “glory of the Lord” that shone around shepherds in the field “keeping watch over their flock by night.” In their case, they were afraid. I might be, too, if my star appeared out of nowhere accompanying an angel of the Lord.
So, while my star does not frighten me, perhaps my joy in looking at it is in part a response to my ancestors’ own light-filled encounters with the Holy.
***
My first adulthood Christmas tree was purchased in 1984, while living in Palm Springs, California. It was a concession to the fact that my parents would be spending Christmas at my home, a 100-mile drive for them—and a rare instance of them venturing from home at all.
It was a good day, but later I would come to look at it with more than a trace of sadness. It was the Christmas before my father’s colon cancer diagnosis, and the last of anything approaching a “regular” life. Maybe you have had Christmases like that, as well, ones that are marked by memories of better times.
***
You might sense that to be the reason I have skipped trees since, but that would be wrong. Everyone else’s joy at Christmas and all of its cultural expressions were marred much earlier for me by the brutally long and cold nights when my family sold Christmas trees as a means to income in the otherwise unfriendly business month of December for plant nurseries.
I got sick of the smell, the endless repetition of our only seasonal album, The Chimes at Christmas, and the late-night trips after we closed to pick up more trees at the Los Angeles freight yards.
Our gift-giving was spare in those days, and I am sorry to say that I allowed the poverty of those years to impoverish my own sense of Christmas for way too long.
***
So, I got a Christmas tree this year. With a big star. And they bring me joy beyond my understanding. Maybe I’m beginning to accept that the events of Christmases past need not overshadow the brightness of Christmas present.
Mtr Mary
