A Christmas feeling
Those little ornaments
will come back to celebrate a holiday that has adopted
me
December 20, 2004
iranian.com
The tree isn't mine. But how could we spend one Christmas
after another in sub-zero Chicago without a tree? Every time
I passed Michigan Avenue, it felt as if I was in the North Pole
and my children for years thought F.A.Schwartz was Santa's
shop.
Non-Christians, we learned about Christmas traditions
from friends. Back in Chicago, a friend used to take us around
the neighborhood
to sing carols. She made copies of the words for us and, since
we were a large group, no one noticed how off-key my Silent
Night came out.
My friends also taught me all about trees and
ornaments. The variety of ornaments out there makes me feel like
a kid again.
I'm tempted to buy a few each year and by now we have a
box full of them. They are the toys I don't have to be
ashamed of: tiny nut-crackers, dolls and glittery drums. The
shiny globes are my least favorite; they make our tree resemble
those in the department stores. I don't like the department
stores either, they make me resemble shoppers.
 It's fun to trim the tree and top each branch
with silver tinsel. There's a soft magic to them that makes me
forgive
the mess they leave behind.
We're not good tree shoppers, my husband and I.
For thirty years, we've succeeded to pick the crookedest tree
a forest
has to offer.
"You mean the most crooked," he corrects
me.
"No, I mean the crookedest."
The tree is never cut straight so he always has
to take the chainsaw to it before it'll balance in the stand.
Still, our tree
is never as perfect as our neighbor's. It's too tall,
too short or bent at the top, where I need to put the angel.
She can never stand straight and I'm embarrassed at the
way she tilts and you can see her thighs under her long golden
robe.
What I enjoy the most is to bake. Nothing fills
a home with warmth the way that smell of baking does. It puts
me in a Norooz mood--even
though the cookies are different. I sometimes use food coloring
and paint my cookies, one by one. But the rum balls are my
children's favorite. I guess as kids, they enjoyed their one
chance a year
to taste rum, but now that they've grown up the habit must
be hard to kick.
Despite the last minute panic attacks, Christmas
comes and goes without a disaster. Considering that we don't
really know
Santa, and don't ask much from him, the packages we find
under our tree seem to meet everyone's expectations. My
husband is the first to put his gifts out. Years ago, when
kids asked him what those were, he used to tell them Santa
had Fed-Exed
a few items to make sure they got here in time. He made gift
labels in his neat handwriting, but come Christmas morning,
they were too excited to notice Santa had a similar print and
used
the same wrapping paper. I'm always curious about my gifts,
but no matter how I shake the box, it's impossible to guess
which perfume he has bought this year.
Soon it'll be time to put the ornaments away.
My little memories of over thirty years: This one I bought when
my first
child was born. That one came from New England and the other
one was a cute school project my son brought home when he
was four. I take them off the tree, and put them back in the
box
with care.
 No, Christmas isn't mine, even though I now know
the words to most carols by heart. Come to think of it, I'm no
longer
sure who Christmas belongs to. As a child living in Iran,
I knew it was our neighbor, Madam Avanesian's, but here I sometimes
get the feeling it belongs to Bloomingdales.
The tree isn't ours either. It's going to lie
on the sidewalk for the city to recycle. But my box of memories
will be in the attic, waiting for another year, another
optimistic
moment and the unopened gift of time. Those little ornaments
will come back to celebrate a holiday that has adopted
me and once again be the joyful objects of memory.
.................... Peef
Paff spam!
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