First Tuesday of Advent
Every year about this time I go shopping for a live Christmas tree but I don’t actually buy one. I don’t need one because LeAnn and I have one of those sturdy, dependable artificial trees that you buy once a decade. Still, every year I take Wilshire pal George Gagliardi to get his tree and that puts me in close personal contact with real live Christmas trees.
It’s been a great tradition for at least a decade. Sometimes we attach lunch or a grocery stop to the outing, but this year it was just a tree. And that should have made for a short errand because we usually go to the same grocery store, get the tree, and take it to George’s apartment. But this year’s outing was the longest ever because the usual place wasn’t selling trees at all, and other locations we visited either just had tabletop trees, or their full-size trees were, well, to put it in a lyric that George might write and sing: “Oh Tannenbaum, Oh Tannenbaum, outrageous are your prices . . .”
We finally found a reasonable combination of height and cost at an old-style Christmas tree lot. While standing in the temporary office they put up every year, I looked around and realized I had been there years before when a real tree was still my ideal. While I pondered Christmases past, a thin woman with short gray hair and twinkly eyes above her mask came in, and I could tell from the conversation that she was a long-time customer. She said, “Did you think you wouldn’t see me this year?” and the attendant answered, “No ma’am, we knew you would come, just weren’t sure when.” And then she said she had picked out her tree and it was to be flocked and delivered “as usual.”
I can’t imagine how many hundreds of dollars the woman spent, but George and I talked about that as we drove away with his small tree. We reasoned that someone who has the wherewithal to put a lot of money into a Christmas tree likely has enough to do other things we can’t imagine. That’s none of my business; I can’t and won’t judge. But I thought about that later and wondered if her tree was being delivered to her home, or perhaps somewhere else. For all I know the tree was going to a charity. Regardless, judging from her enthusiasm and the sparkle in her eyes, I’m betting it will be a gathering place for comfort and joy.
So why do we put so much into our Christmas traditions – especially our Christmas trees? Is it just because we need a suitable place under which to pile our gifts? Or to hang our keepsake ornaments? Or to add splashes of light indoors for a few weeks? Those are some likely reasons, I suppose, but I think there’s more to it than that. There may be a connection to the past: Standing in a tent full of live trees, I was taken back to my childhood when that wonderful aroma filled our house and awakened my senses and imagination to mysteries and miracles.
But now, for me anyway, the annual tree tradition with George is about fellowship. Especially in this time of COVID, when we’re practically begging for a justifiable reason to get together with family and friends. As dumbfounded as we were about the current height-price ratio of live Christmas trees, George and I enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation as we drove from place to place – from the magic of the muse that keeps people like us writing and singing, to the curse of the virus and the angst of the world we live in.
It’s about fellowship, and isn’t that at the heart of the Christmas story anyway? It’s the story of how God desired our fellowship so much that he sent a part of himself to live with us for a while and remain within us forever. Bringing that fellowship back into the light of Christmas and sharing it with each other is worth all the time and effort we put into our holiday traditions.