Deck the Halls

At our house, trimming the tree never works out anything like it does in the movies, with everyone singing carols and drinking mulled cider and looking happy to be with each other. It's usually considered a Christmas Miracle if no ornaments get hurled and no one gets impaled as we try to right the tree. Just choosing the darn thing is a comedy of errors: too short, too skinny, too wide on top, a gaping hole on one side -- nobody can agree, but a tree is finally chosen through attrition of the people who just want to get home and out of the dark and cold.

I steel James' nerves for the lighting of the tree with a small serving of brandy-fortified eggnog. It doesn't do the trick. Jack, still toting his Spiderman Halloween costume embellished with some Elton-John-worthy star-shaped sunglasses, decides to run over all the strings of lights (which James has carefully laid out down the hallway) on his bike without pedals. James puts them on the tree anyway, but half of them don't work. "Grandfather will never approve," he sighs (Note to self: never regale husband with tales of your grandfather's legendary ability to string a perfect tree...).

He's too defeated to hang any ornaments, the little ones are watching Rudolph, Wynham just wants to know the football scores, and Chloe is out at a party, anyway. But Claire wakes up at 6am, and we quietly unwrap a few tissue-encased ornaments and watch a family history unfold: the glass pine cones my grandparents bought in Germany, the unusually-shaped rare ornaments they brought back from Japan, the hand-decorated eggs I bought in Prague, "1st Christmas" milestone ornaments for each of the kids, the exquisite ornaments my mother always sent us, all the children's handmade treasures from over the years: they are all old friends. Come on by; I'll introduce you...