Into the Darkness by Liz Flaherty

Not my tree...

It's still dark this Saturday morning. The lights on the office Christmas tree are brightening the room. I think I should take the tree down, and maybe I will, but not yet. For now it makes me mind less that there has been so much grayness in the days, that the news is so dreadful, and that treating people badly is not only expected, it's often met with approval. Even though the days are lengthening, the first hours I spend in the office are with darkness hanging tough outside. 

So, the Christmas tree. 

Solutions are often easy, but we don't realize it. We complicate things way beyond what is necessary. Is it human nature that makes us do this? We will hold back from doing what is likely the right thing for everyone because we're afraid it will help someone we don't like. We will destroy or throw away something we couldn't make money from rather than give it away. 

Joe DeRozier doesn't do that, by the way. If he has leftover donuts for whatever reason, he makes sure someone gets to enjoy them. Just saying.

Do you have too many good, usable clothes, but you still like new ones? Simple. For every item you buy,  donate two.

Did you replace your towels because they weren't fluffy anymore but you don't need the garage rags you used to make from old ones? Donate the old ones. (Unless they look disgusting. Donating things that are nasty is just...nasty.)

Do you have things you don't really want anymore but they belonged to your mother so you can't just give them away? Sure you can. Your mother didn't want them saved for posterity. She wanted them to be loved and used, and it doesn't have to be done by you. Want to make sure your kids remember them? Take pictures. 

It's easy to buy an extra box of cereal or some extra canned goods at the grocery store and drop them off in a bounty box or at a food pantry. It's easy, once you've read a book, to put it in a Little Free Library. It's easy to give away an old comforter when you buy a new one. It's easy to share, especially if you're sharing things you don't even want. 

It's easy, I guess, to be a Christmas tree in the darkness. Have a good week. Be nice to somebody. 

Christmas Tree Memories by Curtiss Ann Matlock

When Liz invited me to write a holiday-centered post, my mind instantly began to fill with memories of our Christmas trees and my mother.

I grew up with live trees. Yes, I’m old enough to remember a time before artificial trees. And the trees when I was a child were naturally scrawny things, which Mama proceeded to over-load with decorations. Lights first, next the glass ball dating from my mother’s teen years (WWII), and then this little china Cupie-doll with no legs that Mama would tie all the way on the trunk of the tree. Then all manner of glass balls, and lastly, tinsel.

My mother had grown up in the thirties, and Christmas tree tinsel was in vogue. My memory brings up faded black and white photographs of Mama and little me in front of such a tree. No time to dig for the photograph, so I found one on the web. Our early family trees were not far from this one. Mama loved her tinsel.

Tinsel back then was shredded aluminum foil. It didn’t go sliding off the tree like the plastic stuff does today. Being a child of the depression, my mother was thrifty. She did not throw out tinsel, but saved as much as possible from year to year in a large battered box, which made it all the way to the late 1960s. You should have seen my future husband’s face when he saw that box of mashed up tinsel that would be reused on the tree.

In the seventies, my mother moved up to modern times and what was all the rage—an artificial aluminum tree. Yes, you guessed it—she put tinsel on an aluminum tree.

The first year my husband and I celebrated Christmas in our own little apartment, I determined that I was not going to have a cheap, scrawny tree. By then Scotch Pine was in vogue, and by golly, I was having one. My dear husband left the choosing up to me, and we came home with a tree so full that ornaments did not hang but stuck out in the air. My husband did draw the line with tinsel, though. He made me hang each strand of tinsel separately, and not too much. Over the next days, whenever he went to work, I added a bit of it here and there.

I would buy tinsel each season to have for the next year, but then came the year I had run out. I could not find tinsel anywhere; it had become obsolete. I was sorely disappointed. The following year, readers alerted me that a drugstore was selling tinsel. I was excited, however, much less so when I found it was plastic. The old aluminum tinsel had become a thing of the past.

The one thing that has not and never will change is the spirit behind it all, which is love. It is love that gave us Christmas. It is love that has for centuries now propelled us into this yearly craziness of putting a tree in the middle of the house (sometimes tied to the wall to keep the cat from knocking it over.) and indulging in a fine example of self-forgetfulness with gift buying and giving, cooking and gathering. It is all for love. May you enjoy it to the full, and carry it with you into the coming year.

Curtiss Ann Matlock is an American writer of thirty-six novels, three of which are Christmas stories. She resides in south Alabama, where she is busy with family, writing, gardening, and RVing. You can connect with her at her website: www.curtissannmatlock.com