The Christmas Tree Story...

When I was very young, still in primary school, my mom and I had a particularly rough year. The economy was still recovering from the oil crash of ’86 and she’d been working long days as a waitress to make ends meet. Because I’d grown up never really having much, and because she was a better mother than she gives herself credit for being, I didn’t really understand until much later how bad it was.

During winter break, and most others, I stayed with my grandparents and only went home for my mom’s days off. They had their tree up when I arrived. It was artificial, but beautiful, as my grandma was fantastic at that sort of thing. My mom and I, though, had a tradition of getting and decorating a real tree every year. What we lacked in material things, she was always able to make up for and more with love, making the little time we got mean more to me than anything else she could have given me, and that was one of our big ones. To this day, the scent of a real tree evokes traces of that peaceful, blissful time in my life.

For weeks, since the drive home from Thanksgiving, I’d been bugging my mom for a Christmas tree, as it was one of those things we’d always had. I didn’t realize that the reason we didn’t was because we could barely afford to pay the bills and what little was left over she’d been putting towards my present for months prior. There was just no money for a tree.

A few days before Christmas, the night before I was due home, she went to put the last payment on my gift and buy a little food. When all was said and done, she found herself with just over five dollars to her name, standing in the little family-run tree lot off of Ridge, near where they’d put up a K-Mart years later. There were a bunch of families and the attendants were working like crazy to keep up with the last minute rush as she walked from tree to tree, finding even the smallest of them to cost four and five times what she had.

When the old man who ran the lot came up and asked if he could help her, she broke down, explaining our situation, why the tree was as important as it was. She finished in tears. The man, for his part, listened patiently to her story, never rushing her or excusing himself to deal with another customer. He didn’t speak until the end, when he asked her how much she had. When she told him she only had five dollars left, but she would take anything he could give her for it, he just nodded and said he’d see what they had.

She watched him walk to the trees in the back, to find a small, gorgeous tree. He tore off the price tag, not even bothering to look at it, and brought it back to her, telling her that she was in luck, because they had one more five dollar tree. She thanked him profusely and he just waved it away, saying that she’d paid for the tree. He even helped her load it onto the car.

When I got home the next morning, it was sitting on the coffee table, its wide branches having spread thick and full overnight. I was thoroughly overjoyed and we spent the whole of the morning decorating it together. Of all the trees I’ve had in my forty-three years, that’s one of only two that I can remember with perfect clarity.

I've told this story more times than even I can count, my heart. It's one of those that I hold most dearly, so I wanted to share it with you, maybe because I want you to know me a little better, maybe because I want you to know her. It's why we'll always have a tree, come Christmastime. And it's why I'll want to decorate it with you, Katie, the girls, and whomever else makes up our little family, when we make the marzipan piggies and the three-generation sugar cookies. Because it's a way to keep carrying her with me at her favorite time of year.

I love you, my sweet girl, with all my heart and soul. I'll be right here, now and always.