The Year the Tree Stayed Up
It turned into multiple years. I’m not sure I can take it down. Plus, a sparkly vintage jewelry tree—enchanting or gaudy, your call.
Today’s letter is about trees, one big and one small, about the whimsy of glass ornaments and the history they hold, about the ways in which things become familiar or, as in The Velveteen Rabbit, real. Today is about embracing symbols and remembering that there is no single path.
Happy Sunday!
I hope your December has been good. I hope you look for, find, and make symbols that help mark the path of your days.
There is a lot of tree-talk below, with some ornaments mixed in. There are also links to annual reflection and planning tools.
Things feel a bit disjointed, but all the things are in process, including a series of wonky digital drawings of my mom, the final days in my illustrated journal for the year, and the final week of tracking morning light in December.
There is an amaryllis on the verge of opening. It has grown measurably each day. There was a giant ginkgo. There were tile stairs to find and a blueberry scone. There was an office game of Pictionary and many, many games of Skribble.io at home (and much laughter).1
My anniversary was yesterday, and it slid quietly by, only my need to mark these dates giving it a dog-eared corner in my head, the rustle of the paper cranes. In a few days, we will celebrate the holiday, all of us remembering last year’s Christmas Day.
I hope your December has been good and peaceful. I hope you look for, find, and make symbols that help mark the path of your days as the year winds down. I hope you look back at the year and see how the dots line up, how they are connected, and how the thread flows.
Thank you for reading.
Amy
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We all benefit from strong creative habits and routines, and I look forward to documenting life alongside you in the coming year in our illustrated journals.
Update: this post was free at the time of its publication. A paywall has now been added.
The Year the Tree Stayed Up
By now, if you are a tree person, your tree is up. I hope it is full of ornaments and decorations that are special to you and your family, your unique mix of homemade or glass, whimsical or refined, robots or trains or kittens in slippers, Santas or nutcrackers or snowmen. I hope there are lights. I hope you spend time in the early morning, in the dark of the room, with the tree lights on, or late at night when the world has hushed.
I think a tree softens a room.
With its sometimes chaotic mix of color and pattern, it is almost counterintuitive the quiet and calm a tree can bring.
A tree can be peaceful.
A tree can be a lullaby.
A tree can be a poem.
A tree can be a talisman.
Some families put their tree up around Thanksgiving, but our tree has been up for several years.
The fact that I can’t immediately tell you how many Christmases it has stood sentry bothers me. It’s been long enough that we no longer notice, long enough that it no longer seems odd that we have a Christmas tree up year round.
The house is small, and yet part of the living room is occupied by the Christmas tree. It has settled into the space, blending into the surrounding furniture, the walls, the angles, the art on the wall, and the feeling of the room. It simply belongs here.
Looking back at my online receipts, I ordered the lights in December 2021.
I left the tree up because I felt like it might be the last year.
But before I realized that, I spent time taking the old lights off the artificial tree. It had seemed like a simple idea at the time. The bones of the tree were good enough. We didn’t need to waste money on a new tree, but there were so many lights out that we had to do something. Adding a new strand seemed like a way to potentially salvage the existing tree. We talked about just running a new strand over top of everything, but we decided it would be better to remove the old lights completely.
I bought a giant strand of LED lights, and we spent hours untwisting the old ones. We hadn’t counted on the fact that the lights were woven throughout the tree, intricately twisted and looped and wrapped around the branches, each light basically twist-tied in place. It took hours and days untwisting the sharp metal ties, ties so old they seemed to have grown into the tree, well on their way to becoming real. After removing the old ones, I wound the new lights round and round and round.
As the tree widened, I wound lights halfway and moved around the tree to grab the end to move them around again and again and again, twirling in space, dizzy with the reality of the year.
A Color Shift
I grew up with colored lights, and our tree had always glowed with colored lights.
But when the new lights came, they gave me the chance to change to colored or white or a softer colored set, with a range of brightness settings.
I fell in love with the white lights and discovered we actually can change something we think is baked in.
Last year, the lights came on in the night twice, by themselves.
Let’s Just Leave It Up
Back in 2021, I strung the new lights, and we oohed and aahed and enjoyed the tree. We were charmed by having grown into white lights, by the newfound softness. The new year came and went, and the tree stood. That wasn’t unusual. It often stood into February, or even March. There may have been one year where we pushed on the borders of Easter.
The decision to leave it up was subtle, almost subconscious. Gradually, the year moved on, and the tree continued to stand.
I dreaded having to take the lights back off in order to dismantle and store the tree. Every time I would suggest we take it down, someone would say they liked having it up.
The tree is a touchstone of history, of a move to San Francisco, of a small ornament store and glass blown ornaments, of having and raising two little boys, of a fat cat and then a tiny gray dog.
When it was time to start putting everything away, I felt like things were going to happen that year.
I don’t know how direct I was about it (even with myself) at the time. I just know I felt the weight of the symbol. I felt like it meant something.
I felt like the tree should stay up, a bright spot in the house, a witness to the year.
The longer I left it up, the more I worried about tipping the balance of the world by taking it down.
Christmas came again, and the same reasoning still held. So I left it up again. This is Christmas number four.
I was a few years early, but even that says a great deal about the tenor of the last few years.