The earliest Christmas I can remember, I was maybe seven or eight. We had a Christmas tree decorated with red glass balls and a string of colored lights.
If you turned off any one bulb of those lights, the whole string would go dark. My brother and I devised a game in which one of us would go out of the room and the other would turn one of the colored light bulbs just barely enough so that all the bulbs would go out. Then the other would come back into the room and try to guess which bulb, when turned, would light up the whole string.
We played this silly little game for hours, probably because it gave us an excuse to fiddle with the Christmas tree and assess the packages underneath.
Our Christmases then were pretty spare and simple, but the magic of the lighted tree, the red glass balls, and our own self-invented game stays with me still, aglow with nostalgia more than 60 years afterwards.
Some 20 Christmases or so later, Elizabeth and I were married on Christmas Eve. And though we were happy and in love, we were living in a tiny apartment in Rutland, a ways from home and family, and a bit lonely.
Then Patrick, one of my newspapering friends, also recently married, called up. Would we like to drive around Rutland with him and Franka and look at the Christmas lights?
We would, we did, and felt a lot less alone.
Later still, after our son, Ethan arrived, we spent many Christmases at the home of my wife’s parents in Lyndonville: turkey dinners, plum puddings, lots of decorations, and never a thought that the good times might change.
The years have continued to pass – they seem to do that – and Christmas is different.
Patrick and Franka are both dead, Ethan now lives far away on the West Coast, my in-laws are now in their 90s, and the family doesn’t gather any more. The holiday has gone from a large, semi-chaotic, two-family celebration to a much smaller, two-person event.
We haven’t done much in the last few years about Christmas, not even a tree last year. So when Elizabeth announced that our only decoration this year would be a big wreath on the front door, that seemed about right to me.
Yet December came, snowy and dark, and when Elizabeth came back with the big wreath, she brought with her a little three-foot balsam fir – our Christmas tree, 2014.
I’m looking at it now, as it stands sporting red glass balls and a string of bright lights.
Some things just don’t want to die. It’s Christmas for us, once again.
