Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown.

If I could petition to move Christmas out a month, I would.  It always comes so closely after Thanksgiving – particularly this year with Thanksgiving falling as late as it possibly could in November – and no one is immune to the end of the year craze and hustle of wrapping up projects and to-dos while simultaneously gift buying, wrapping, and general holiday prepping. Oh, and of course, there’s the desire to actually make time for genuine holiday cheer.  It always makes me so sad when all the bright, cheerful, and festive Christmas lights come down in January, leaving us in the cold and dark for many winter months. So yes, if we could celebrate until January 25^th, I believe I would take it – give us all a bit more breathing room and stretch the season a tad bit longer.

Alas. Christmas will not be moving any time soon and subsequently I crammed in as much festivity as I reasonably could in a few short weeks.  The Christmas tree has always been one of my favorite parts of Christmas, but even I hesitated this year about getting one.  It seemed silly to spend money on something I’d throw out in a few weeks, I would be traveling for Christmas and weeks after, it can admittedly be a pain in the neck to set up and decorate, the season was short, etc. etc. Then I stopped to listen to myself and realized I was being ridiculous because - the tree is one of my favorite parts of Christmas.

After price shopping around a few corner tree lots, I settled on a tree from my local bodega stand.  What holiday luck that my bodega was the closest and cheapest option!  So, I handed over my cash and swung the tree over my shoulder, making my way back to my little Manhattan apartment.  Once the tree was in its stand and the white lights were strung, I started in on the ornaments. The more ornaments I hung, the more disappointed I became in my little tree.  I felt like I’d picked a lousy one.  The branches weren’t very strong and they couldn’t support my heavier ornaments, there were several open bare spots that I had a hard time filling with the ornaments I owned, and every time I’d take a step back and eye the decorating in progress I would feel like I was looking at my own version of a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree.  But what can you do when you’ve already bought and set up the tree? So I finished my decorating with a shrug, chalking the tree up to yet another disappointment in 2019, and went about my business.  

Still, I came home every night and plugged my little tree in, happy to have the ambiance of Christmas lights, grateful for the fresh pine scent permeating my apartment.  A handful of days later I found myself looking at my tree in a new way.  Instead of only seeing her flaws, I began to notice all of her perfections.  In fact my ornaments actually looked quite beautiful where they’d all landed, despite my initial frustrations.  There was nary a bare spot in sight. The string of white lights that I’d debated not being enough provided just the right amount of warmth and glow.  More and more I realized this little tree of mine might just be one of the prettiest I’ve ever owned.  

She was beautiful in her own right from the get-go; she just needed a little time to shine.  

There’s a lesson in there.

This season I have been thinking a lot about all that we do each holiday season to mark the passage of time, to wind down another year. I'm not sorry to see 2019 shut its doors soon; this year was a doozy and frankly, kind of a jerk on a lot of levels.  But I'm trying to take the lessons from it, working to remember the good that it did give me.  I am working to see the beauty that was always right in front of me - even if initially all I could notice were its open and bare spots.