January 16, 2005 4:14 PM
One thing you should know about me
My Christmas tree is still up.
The weekend before school started I was all set to take it down. I'd reached that point -- you know -- where as excited as I'd been about decorating the month before, I was now really tired of the clutter.
So we'd swooped through the house and boxed every bit of Christmas -- except the tree. The tree's about 10 feet tall this year. As usual, we'd had to rearrange all the furniture to accomodate it. As usual, the kids had "decorated" the tree in ten minutes flat (you can imagine). As usual, dh Tripp had spent three hours rearranging the ornaments to make the tree more beautiful -- something he loves to do every year.
But there were some things that were different. It was a crowded month, with the usual plays and concerts (I love to see my kids on stage!), but also two speaking gigs for me -- including one in Menlo Park, CA. Something really had to give. And so ironically, in a month where I was speaking and writing about the importance of family traditions, some of ours went by the wayside.
The first was the tree. For the past 22 years, our tradition has been to haul the kids to a tree farm, come to some sort of agreement about the perfect tree, watch with admiration as Daddy cut it down, and take pictures of the kids and the tree on the tractor which hauls them back.
So I surprised myself when at the beginning of December, surveying the month ahead, I asked Tripp to go out and "just buy a tree." A few hours later, there was a tree in our house and one big sigh of relief.
Another Menlo Park speaker said that Christmas was like a final exam for mommies. So much pressure to do everything right. Every mother there was nodding her head. But you know what? We're the ones who make the pressure. In sharing about the importance of traditions myself, I emphasized that traditions are there to serve the family, not vice versa. They shouldn't be weighing you down. Jesus said he came to lighten our burdens, so if we celebrate his birth by deliberately adding to our own, how ironic is that?
So flexibility's good, and our Christmas tree is now celebrating 42 days of showing off its graceful form and crisp needles, its sweet piney smell wafting from the living room into my office as I write. If I'd gone with habit and just taken it down without thinking, I'd have missed all these pine scented days -- plus dark nights cozying up on the couch with one or two or three or four of my kids, just gazing at the Christmas tree.
Some times in the past we've taken down the tree and I've caught myself regretting that Christmas came and went so fast, the tree was just a blur. This year, I feel like I got to know my tree and myself a little more.
