i really love this.

langer:

The in between times are weird.

I’ve never had my own Christmas tree before but woke up this morning and decided that this year I had to have one. I don’t know why the urge felt so immediate but then again I don’t know why I’ve recently been emailing my mother every other day asking for old recipes she used to make for me when I was growing up. I’m willing to assume these two things are related, or at least probably.

The first Christmas tree means starting from scratch. It means not having any ornaments and so it means not having any memories to pull out of a box and hang on the tree with those little metal hooks that are effectively just paper clips which you have hundreds of at home but you buy the metal clips anyway because of marketing or something. Growing up I had one ornament that was my ornament: it was a miniature ‘65 Mustang convertible with the top down and some presents in its backseat that my mother bought for me at Hallmark next to the local supermarket when I was going through a car phase at eleven or twelve and she’d just been remarried to a Christian man who came into our lives and brought all of his New Testament customs along with him and ornaments were a thing we needed now. We boxed up the menorah and put it in the basement and my older sister and I were happier this way because we’d always wanted a Christmas tree anyway.

I went to one of those seasonal shops today that are only open two months of the year, the kind of place that makes you wonder if its proprietors only work two out of every twelve months or if they actually work all year round and just pivot into other holidays like Easter and Halloween which seems more likely.

I thought about how maybe we’re meant to make our Christmas trees in our parents’ image, because the lights had to be white, just like David always insisted, because David thought colored lights were tacky. So I bought the white lights, 150 feet of them, thinking 150 feet for a seven-foot tree was a healthy enough ratio, because the tree has to have depth, David used to say: the lights can’t just be draped or wrapped around the tree but they go out from the ends of the branches and in towards the trunk and then back out again—that’s how David always got the depth, meticulously pacing around the tree for hours at a time in his coke bottle lenses and his red and black checkered chamois shirt tucked into his jeans.

I swung by the wine shop and asked Meg what she thought was the prettiest label they had, which is a stupid question to ask but she fielded it graciously anyway, suggesting a Côtes du Rhône, but that wasn’t going to work because I kind of hate Côtes du Rhône, but then she pointed out a Merlot I’d had once before that I remembered really liking and it had a great label so I bought it. I told her I was decorating my first Christmas tree and I didn’t have a tree topper so I was going to drink this bottle of wine and turn it upside down and put it on the top of the tree because sure why not.

The in between times are weird.

The Christmas tree salesman was a few blocks away. He set up shop on the sidewalk off of Manhattan Avenue, just like in the movies, though it couldn’t possibly have been more different from growing up in Princeton and driving out into the hills in Pennsylvania and strapping a tree to the roof of the Volvo wagon. The Christmas tree salesman sold me a Fraser Fir and laughed at me when I called car service to get the tree home because really what kind of driver was going to let me drop seven feet worth of needles in the back of his Crown Victoria anyway. He was right to laugh. I threw the tree on my shoulder instead and tried to act cool when I realized how heavy it was and how far I had to go to get home. On my way there I passed three different couples carrying their trees home together while I was carrying mine alone to an empty apartment.

The in between times are weird, when all eight grandparents are dead and the older sister has a husband and a kid of her own now and half the parents have moved to Florida and the other half have settled down into new routines and I’m in this place that’s in between what was and whatever’s next, but in any event I’m going to finish this bottle of wine now because the in between times are weird and I have a Christmas tree that needs something on top of it.