My Christmas Tree

One morning when I was six years old I woke up and saw a Christmas tree standing at the foot of my bed. Not a big tree, not a little tree, a medium-sized tree, very green, very full. Its only decorations were shiny colored balls – red and yellow, blue and green – and silver tinsel draping it from top to bottom. It stood bright and beautiful against a backdrop of complete darkness.

My tree.

Mom had said no every time I asked, no, I could not have a Christmas tree. We were Jewish, we didn’t celebrate Christmas, except for the stocking she would hang in the living room and fill with nuts and chocolate and oranges for me to find on December 25. Like a lot of Jewish parents, she let a little bit of Christmas into our lives. Stocking, yes. A tree, never.

But a tree was what I wanted, and here it was, an unexpected gift. My tree.

Then I really woke up. No tree. It was only a dream, an especially vivid, amazingly tangible dream.

After that year I decided to accept the fact that I would never have a Christmas tree. As the only Jewish student in my grade school, I liked answering other kids’ questions about Hanukkah. Being different, unique, had its compensations. I could live quite well without Christmas, thank you.

When I was 17 years old and just graduated from high school, I spent a couple hours with a fellow graduate learning about the Bahá'í Faith. Here at last was an explanation for the station of Christ that made sense to me, that seemed logical and likely to be true. This and other aspects of the new religion attracted me, beckoned further study, and several months later, to my parents’ horror, I signed a little card and officially identified myself as a Bahá'í.

Seven years later I married a fellow Bahá'í whose family was Catholic. They had great fun watching me participate in Christmas for the first time. I enjoyed it, too, but after a few years found it was no longer fun. There’s a kind of “have to” frenzy surrounding Christmas that seems normal to people who grow up with it but looked crazy to me watching it from the outside, and felt even crazier after a few years on the inside. I loved my husband’s family but just couldn’t love Christmas. We stopped participating, and since we didn’t celebrate Christmas in our own home, I was done with the whole thing.

I never forgot the tree in my dream, however, the tree I wanted as a child but could not have. The picture of it in my mind remained clear and vibrant. Not a big tree, not a little tree, a medium-sized tree, very green, very full. Its only decorations were shiny colored balls – red and yellow, blue and green – and silver tinsel draping it from top to bottom. It stood bright and beautiful against a backdrop of complete darkness.

I told my husband about the dream. He said he wished he could see my tree, it sounded so special.

My mother and I had a difficult relationship. She wanted so much to be the perfect mother, because she had never had one of her own, at least not one she could remember. My grandmother had been killed in a robbery when Mom was less than a year old. She was raised by a loving father whom she adored, but she also suffered from the stern influence of her mother’s sister and her much older brothers’ abusive attempts at co-parenting. She was sure her life would have been wonderful if her mother had lived. Without a real mother, or the up-and-down experience of an actual mother-daughter relationship, she envisioned a perfect mother. When she became one herself, she wanted to be perfect, too.

But in order to be a perfect mother one must have a perfect child, a child that proves ones perfection to the world. I didn’t fill that bill. Mine was a strong-willed-ever-questioning-always-fighting-for-independence personality that she described in mostly negative adjectives – stubborn, mean, selfish, cold. I could never be the perfect child who would allow her to be the perfect mother.

She died on December 19, 1990. My sister called a couple days before to tell us Mom had slipped into the expected coma so that we could get to St. Louis before the end. I imagined myself sitting with my mother at her bedside to pray and maybe, finally, find a bond with her. Instead I stood in the doorway to her bedroom and watched as her body struggled to breathe. A coma was a much more active and strenuous event than I had anticipated. Her soul was struggling to let go and move on. It felt wrong to intrude on such a private experience. Or maybe I was just afraid, even then, of being unable to meet my mother’s needs, of being the wrong kind of daughter.

After the funeral, my husband and I stopped by his mother’s place to stay overnight before continuing our drive home. She had been widowed a couple years earlier and had moved into an apartment. The family’s Christmas had migrated to her daughter’s farm house a few miles outside of town, and the tree in that house had become the family tree, decorated with their traditional supply of much handled Santa Clauses and homemade baubles.

There was also a Christmas tree in my mother-in-law’s apartment. She told us that she hadn’t really wanted one, but her daughter had insisted and installed it there. When we arrived I was very tired and hardly noticed it sitting in the picture window in her living room. We visited a bit, then went to bed. The apartment had a guest bedroom, but I told my husband that I wanted to sleep alone in the living room, since it was likely that I would wake up often, probably cry again, maybe pull out my notebook and write to continue processing my mother’s death.

For a couple of hours I slept on the couch, my face pressed against its back, wearily oblivious to the rest of the room. Then I woke up and turned over to face the picture window and looked for the first time at the tree that was standing there.

Not a big tree, not a little tree, a medium-sized tree, very green, very full. Its only decorations were shiny colored balls – red and yellow, blue and green – and silver tinsel draping it from top to bottom. It stood bright and beautiful against a backdrop of complete darkness.

I recognized it immediately. It was my tree. The tree of my dream. The tree I had wanted so much as a child. 39 years later, I was seeing it again. But now it was real.

And I knew that my mother had found the perfect time to give it to me.

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