So This is Christmas. . . .

Christmas is so funny now. There’s so much bullshit tradition and commercialism wrapped around it these days, I can’t even remember why it used to be my favorite time of year. In recent years, for the most part, the Christmases I’ve enjoyed the most have been the most non-traditional: Christmas in Las Vegas one year, in Italy another.

I once ranked Christmas at the top of the list of the best times of the year ahead of fall. But now fall is so clearly the winner and Christmas is falling behind … I don’t know … spring for instance, that it’s almost to the point where I wish we could just skip from Thanksgiving to pitchers and catchers reporting.

I grew up an only child, and even extended family was thousands of miles away. My Christmas memories are of going into the mountains and cutting a fresh Christmas tree with my dad in early December. We’d go to the Bureau of Land Management office and buy our Christmas tree tag and map for $1. Then we’d drive my mom’s 1972 Volkswagen squareback up the muddy logging roads of the coast range. We would hike through the logged areas until we found a good full tree. We’d cut it down, lash it to the car and drive it home. Inevitably upon arrival the tree would be too tall by a matter of feet, and we’d cut it down to size and use the leftover greens to line the deck railings and front stairs.

There was the ritual of dragging the tree up the outside stairs, through the double doors, up the half-flight to the top floor of the house, through the dining room and into the corner of living room behind the couch. Furniture had to be moved and every year we’d bump the chandelier that hung from the ceiling in the dining room and watch anxiously for a few seconds to see if this year it would fall. Once the tree was up in the stand and as close to vertical as we could make it, my mom would begin vacuuming all the pine needles out of the brown shag carpet. Then we’d place that same white sheet around the base and my dad would fill the tree stand with a mix of water and vitamin B-1. This was supposed to keep the tree fresh, but inevitably by the week after New Year’s the thing was brittle and needles would fall off every time one of us would walk by.

Once the tree was up, my mom would drag out the same beat-up old moving boxes filled with all the Christmas trappings, including about a dozen boxes of Shiny-Brite ornaments from the 1960s; assorted plastic bags full of other random ornaments—some of which I made in school and others like a little wooden airplane and a blue-and-red papier-mache drummer boy holding glued-on gold cymbals acquired in odd shops over the years; light strings that up until my sophomore year of high school used actual colored light bulbs, before they were deemed a fire hazard; a sandwich bag full of wire hooks that we would dump into the same round smoked-glass ashtray every year; and various wreaths, table settings and window decorations.

These would all be unpacked carefully and inspected for damage. No matter how carefully the Shiny-Brites were repackaged at the end of every Christmas season, one or two would always be broken the next year when we opened the boxes. Then on some weekend night, with a fire in the fireplace, my parents would put on the Firestone Christmas LPs featuring Bing Crosby or the Boston Pops or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and we’d decorate the tree.

Later my dad and I would put up the outside lights, spending several hours alternating blinkers and non-blinkers and ensuring randomness in the order of the colors—no blues next to blues, or reds next to reds. Then Christmas would run its course, culminating with Christmas eve at midnight mass and opening the handful of presents on Christmas day.

It seemed normal enough, even though most of my friends’ Christmases involved virtual mountains of presents, traveling to see grandmas and grandpas, or having family in from out of town. Every year, it was just the three of us. Money was tight the last couple of years of high school, and my recollection is of lower-key Christmases that started later.

After I went to college, my parents moved. In the ensuing years, we kept up the tradition of decorating the tree, having a fire in the fireplace and listening to the Christmas LPs, only now the tree came from the parking lot at the nearby Albertson’s grocery store. It wasn’t a Douglas fir any longer, it was a noble or some other kind of pine tree that didn’t look the same or hold the ornaments the same way. And I didn’t live there; I was visiting.

For the most part, the players remained the same, although during my senior year of college I spent part of Christmas with my girlfriend at the time and her family, which was a much bigger and more traditional celebration. The following Christmas I was living on my own for the first time and working about three hours and one mountain range away, and could only spend a couple of days home for Christmas. It might have sometime around then that I began to feel the tradition of Christmas slipping away

At first I missed it. I moved to Chicago, where I spent Christmases with my fiancée’s family. We tried to do the traditional family thing with my fiancée’s step dad and his family, but in reality the two sets of kids didn’t mix well and that part of it ended up feeling awkward and forced.

Then we moved to New York, and in 2000 it was just the two of us in our one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. We bought a little tree from in front of the green grocer a block away, plopped it in the living room and strung little white lights on it. When we were finished, we turned off all the lights except the tree and went across the street to see what it looked like from outside. I liked thinking about New Yorkers … Brooklynites … walking by in a hustle and seeing the tree in the window.

We attended midnight mass at a little Catholic church off Henry Street with about 25 other people. They asked us to bring up the gifts. In 2001 we spent Christmas in Las Vegas, which was cool in a bizarre way. There no outward signs it was Christmas. Down on Fremont Street, I saw a sign in the window of a souvenir shop that said “We will be closed Tuesday, Dec. 25. We will reopen Wednesday, Dec. 26.” That was it, no mention of why the store was going to be closed on Tuesday. We flew back to New York on Christmas day. The airport and the plane were empty.

In 2002 we bought a tree in a pot, a rosemary bush, I think, and put one or two ornaments on it. We placed it on the table in the living room. In 2003 we were back in Chicago doing the weird step-family thing again, which convinced us to plan our trip to Italy the next year at Christmastime. Being there was refreshing, there was so much less commercialism. We went to midnight mass at the Vatican, and Pope John Paul II said mass. The next spring he died.

Why am I recounting all this? I was thinking about that in the car tonight. I had started writing this in the afternoon. It’s now after midnight, and I think the point is that for me, traditional Christmases ended when the tradition I had known as a child ended. I’ve tried hanging on to elements of that tradition, re-creating it in various ways in various places, but it’s gone. There’s no point in trying to hang on to something that’s gone; it’s a lot of work that ultimately ends in frustration.

I’m much happier channeling my energy into enjoying these “post-tradition” Christmases, an exercise that may be its own new tradition. Christmas will never again be what it was, but there is promise in the possibility that it can always be new. If I embrace that notion, maybe it can again become my favorite time of year.