It is two weeks before Christmas and completely dark at eight o’clock. Across the room the Christmas tree stands, the tiny lights just bright enough to make it hard to differentiate among the ornaments. Somewhere among the branches is a sand-cast lighthouse, a wooden creche, and a glass possum. At the top is a Waterford crystal star. It is clearly an artificial tree. It has no scent. Its trunk is ruler straight. The branches are flexible, bendable into whatever angle provides the most attractive placement for the baubles and balls to dangle.
Directly outside the window in front of which the Christmas tree stands is the crepe myrtle I planted in the spring and the reflection of the lights makes it look as though I have decorated this tree, this real tree, too.
The juxtaposition of real and fake, actual and artificial, genuine and pretend has become, I suppose, a hallmark of the Christmas season. “Is he the real Santa Claus?” small children ask as they stand in line for a photo with the man in the red suit. “Do you like it?” we question as the recipients of our gifts rip away the thin paper emblazoned with images of reindeer and snow. “Oh, you don’t have to get me anything,” we assure those from whom we well know we will receive a gift.
Battery-operated candles, plastic ribbons, and electronic bells are ubiquitous. Inflatable igloos stay frozen in 80-degree weather. Jig-sawed nativities are projected in two-dimensional simplicity. Numbed by convenience, we 21st-century observants see absolutely nothing remarkable in any of it.
The idea makes me wistful for real trees that smell like tar and drop needles on the rug, for candles that drip wax on the mantle and leave permanent reminders of their flickering light, for chilly afternoons spent shopping up and down Main Street with my mother and standing in line at the wrapping station at Belk. It makes me wonder if anybody’s grandmother still keeps a bowl of hard candy – all scrolled with red and green – on the coffee table. It makes me wish for one more Christmas Eve breakfast at Franklin’s and one more Christmas pageant where the first-graders sing real Christmas carols.
Tomorrow morning the crepe myrtle will look spindly, not splendid. Its leafless branches will tremble in the sunlight, so thin and fragile and vulnerable. I have to admit it was more beautiful adorned by the reflection.
It suddenly hits me that the holiday itself, the sacred and at the same time secular celebration, is also made more beautiful by reflection – by memory and contemplation, by reminiscence and wonderment. That it is only by the comparison of now to then, genuine to pretend that I am able to identify and differentiate between that which lasts and that which fades.
And this is what the comparing and differentiating tells me: Christmas lasts. The story remains. The promise is repeated. Whether in the light of a candle made with wax and wick or one made of metal and plastic, it is still the light. Now and forever.
Copyright 2024
So beautiful. 💕