Perhaps there’s nothing more bittersweet, especially after you’ve entered the decade where your age begins with the number seven, than to decorate a Christmas tree all by yourself.
For starters, it’s hard to move the darn thing from the basement to the living room. Does it make sense to lug it up thirteen steep basement stairs and risk tumbling backwards and cracking your head open on the concrete floor? Or is it better to take the tree out the basement door and drag it all the way across the front yard, which is anything but level, and then up the porch steps and into the living room?
And, yeah, I know I could disassemble the tree when I take it down every year and store all the parts in an easy-to-carry tote bag, but that would mean figuring out what goes where next Christmas and I’m just not up for that. Not yet, anyway.
When I finally get the tree into the living room, I put it in front of a window that faces the street. Then begins the dreaded task of stringing lights. Though the tree is small—not even six feet tall—it’s just big enough around that I can’t quite touch my left hand with my right when wrapping lights around the middle. Last year, I finally got them in place only to discover that, though I’d tested them before I began working, one entire string wouldn’t light no matter how many times I unplugged and re-plugged it. But I left that dead string draped around the tree for the next five weeks because I was just too worn out to start over.
If it looked ridiculous, too bad.
But this year I had two brand new strings of lights. I tested and then wound them carefully around the tree, spacing them just right. Victory! One-hundred and forty warm-white mini-lights glowed softly in the afternoon twilight.
Next came the really hard part: hanging the ornaments. It’s the memories that are hard, of course, not the hanging of them. Years ago, mice ate all of my children’s pre-school-era ornaments adorned with pasta or Froot Loops. But other ornaments from their childhood survived. Some are self-portraits drawn with crayons on cardboard. Some are wooden clothespin reindeer with tiny red noses. Some are crooked snowflakes cut from paper doilies.
There are ornaments that depict the Cookeville depot and First Methodist Church. There’s a red-and-blue globe that says Atlanta Braves: World Series Champions 1995. A “Baby’s First Christmas” ornament for each child. A birdhouse with a woodpecker perched outside its door. And on and on and on.
When you hang ornaments like that all by yourself and get to thinking about decades of Christmases past, it’s hard not to get emotional. Impossible, actually.
Maybe that’s why, when my widowed mother was about the age I am now, she quit putting up a tree. “It’s too hard to get it upstairs from the basement,” she told my brother and sister and me, though all she had to do was pick up the phone and we’d have been there to help and she knew it. Now I understand the real reason she quit. It’s overwhelmingly sad to face the coming of Christmas with your kids all grown up and scattered and with so many empty chairs, chairs once filled with loved ones now dead and gone, at the dining table.
My mother gave me her Christmas tree a couple of years before she passed away. For a while, I was too overcome with grief to use it. But as time has passed, I’ve grown tougher. Tough enough to wrestle that little pine tree up thirteen steep stairs and drag it to the corner of the living room every December.
But not quite tough enough to keep from crying when I hang the ornaments, one by one, upon its delicate branches.
(December 6, 2025)