The Tree

We bought a Christmas tree today, the kids and I.

For weeks we have all been sick, the children tossing, fretful in the night, with fever and barking coughs. In the day we built white mountains of our discarded tissues and took restless naps among the precarious towers of our emptied teacups. The hours bled together into kisses for hot pink brows, warm spoonfuls of honey for aching throats, and tented sheets full of steam and eucalyptus.

The world has seemed to shrink to fit inside these grey walls. I've not ventured farther than the railroad-tie stairs up to the mailbox, not seen the sky beyond the irregular blue patch between the lattice of bare tree limbs.

So it felt like an act of rebellion today, just as we're all getting better (minus DH, poor soul, who has gone down last and hardest), to drive to the dirt lot across from the gas station, where Fraser firs stood lined up in the gathering twilight. The children chose a towering, plump one, with glossy, bottle-green needles, too wide for the circle of their joined hands. Too tall, too big, I thought, but let them prevail.

So we brought it home and put it in the corner, scraping every doorway in our path, and we brought the outside in to us. Now the wild scent of pine overwhelms the living room and slides up the stairs. We have put on the lights but not the ornaments, and in the dark it glows. A slice of the forest within our walls.

These past years I haven't been a Christmas person, really. I don't care for the shelves crammed with holiday merchandise in September or Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole on repeat. I don't own any ugly sweaters, at least not on purpose. The call for cheer and goodwill rings hollow, a child's toy drum, amid the screens that bring me pictures of rubble piles and blood, and a house on the route I used to walk blown up to the stars, and a crooked politician wishing us all to hell.

But tonight I sat a long time in the soft circle of the tree's light after the children were all asleep.

This, this is the Christmas I want. I want a slice of heaven inside these gloomy walls, something wild and alien, something from an altogether different plane, invading this one. A peace as sharp and fresh as pine in a world sick unto death of worry and war. Joy as bright as a burning bush. A candle to hold and make me brave for nights dark and long, to bear and to work patiently for the good, no matter what the shadows may hold before the dawn. A hope, too big and real for this planet of ours, brought to live inside it with us.