My wife is curing me of my ambivalence towards Christmas. She likes it. I like her. There is always a substantial metaphorical breeze that causes a drift towards the enjoyment of anything enjoyable to your coterie of friends, neighbors, and especially your loved ones. It’s why lynch mobs function at such a high level; it’s not just Christmas.
We buy a Christmas tree from the same people every year. Our children act like an odometer for our travel through life over the last eleven years or so. We exchange pleasantries and then count how many we’ve each got, and gauge how tall they’ve gotten in the interim. My older son stood, aw shucks, at the cash register while the owner’s daughter of identical vintage stood next to her mother and rang up our sale. When we first met our spruce suppliers, the Nasrallas, our boy was a tiny infant, and that daughter was a newborn.
It’s happier not to deal with strangers for such transactions. Impersonal things can be bought impersonally. A Christmas tree is not an impersonal thing, or shouldn’t be, anyway. No man that has ever shown me a picture of his children is a stranger.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
3 Responses
I don’t know if it has been said, or often enough, but the pictures that head your words make the tale a painting all its own. Wonderful job.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
That’s a picture of Woonsocket, RI, about sixty or seventy years ago.
Sippican: In the good ole 82d Airborne Division, there was a saying that went something like,”the 82d is a bandwagon. Get on it. Or get run over by it.”