Asymmetry, Asymmetry, How Lovely Are Thy Branches

Basically, I am the worst, in that I have this carefully cultivated persona of someone who is eternally at ease, blessed out on the notion of going with the flow, and overjoyed by the constant surprises that life in all its messiness constantly provides. But underneath that, I have an abundance of strong opinions and preferences and I am always trying to make sure that things go the way that I want them to, so long as my efforts remain essentially undetectable, and when I fail I can just play it off as never having been a big deal to me one way or the other in the first place. I like to think that I draw the line well before the outright manipulation of people, per se, but manipulating outcomes falls in more of a gray area. And when it comes to controlling physical things, I yield to temptation often enough that I don’t really think I have anyone fooled there. People who know me, or especially have been to my house (and all through the parts of my house that are expressly mine) know that I’m a collector, cataloguer and curator with an unmistakable obsessive streak.

The intersection of this not-so-proud aspect of myself and the Christmas season probably comes into focus most around the old tannenbaum. The end of year holiday celebrations do genuinely put me in a good mood and I find myself more tolerant than usual of certain annoying things (e.g., I can listen to the Christmas music FM station for hours on end and even the cheesiest and corniest of offerings do not put me off) and completely, sincerely enthused about more positive things, including shopping for and decorating the tree. But, oh man, do I have some starkly defined standards in my heart of hearts for said tree.

It’s the expected stuff for the arboreal specimen itself: it has to be real, fresh, compact needles, dense branches, nice isosceles shape, all that. The massive control freak in me peeks out more when it comes to hanging the lights and ornaments, because those have to be JUST. SO. It’s not so much the character of the ornaments themselves. Survey the collection my wife and I have amassed and you will find cheap ones of Styrofoam and glitter that were literally bought by the dozen and get stored loose in a shoebox, and you’ll find exquisite blown-glass ones that have their own individual impact-resistant sheaths; you’ll find quirky, kitschy ones and classic, understated ones; you’ll find handmade and homemade and Hallmark. But given all of that, there’s a certain method of placing them on the tree that my brain insists is the only proper way to go about it. Every ornament needs to hang from a bough by a string or a hook such that it’s suspended magically in space, without leaning on a branch beside it or resting on a branch underneath, and if it has a front and a back the front must be facing outwards (obviously). And the distribution needs to be well-spaced, so that none of the identical snowmen (or of-a-kind jungle animals or matching snowflakes &c.) are too close to one another, and if the Mario Lemieux figurine is in the upper right quadrant of the tree then maybe the similarly-sized Troy Polamalu figurine should be, not exactly opposite, but at least generally in the lower left area. And so on. I admit it: every year my wife and I decorate the tree together, and every year I make minor adjustments to the placement of the ornaments she hangs, both while we are co-trimming and pretty much every time I walk past the tree for the rest of the month (including re-hanging some of the ones I originally hung, as well, because once you move one ornament it can throw off the balance for a whole swath of the bigger evergreen picture).

Except, guess what? I think this year is the year that finally broke me of the habit. Partly because we got off to a bit of a rough start, with the discovery that many of our trusty old strings of lights were completely non-functional, coupled with the realization that they do not make incandescent tree lights anymore, and the new LED kind don’t mesh visually with the old ones. (The plan currently is to buy several strands of LED lights during the post-Christmas sales and embrace the future going forward … just, you know, not now.) So the lights on the tree are not perfect, totally fine but not the ideal swirling rainbow galaxy I would have aimed for. But far more impactful, as always, are all of our various dependents. The younger cats love playing with the ornaments they can reach, and swat them off their perches pretty easily. The dogs continue to show no restraint whatsoever about wagging their tails when walking past the Christmas tree. And of course both the little guy and the little girl love messing with the Christmas decorations. To be fair, they do all look like little glittery toys. The little guy has also shown his own little obsessive tendencies, for instance gathering up three or four or five snowmen or jungle animals and re-hanging them all together off the same branch, like a yuletide bunch of bananas. (Which of course is the diametric opposite of my own compulsion, and no, the irony is not lost on me at all.)

For about a hot minute I actually entertained the idea of actively combating the entropy, and fixing what the kids and pets had (un)done to the tree every time I wandered within arm’s reach, or maybe at least once a day. But ultimately I decided against that. Let this be the year that the family Christmas tree is a bit on the wild and unruly side, with reasonably well-apportioned decorations on the upper half and a chaotic mix of bare branches and clumps of ornaments and askew strings of lights on the lower half, plus a good number of the cheaper (disposable) ornaments scattered on the floor underneath. I have a sneaking suspicion that there’s a metaphor somewhere amidst all that, too.

P.S. This is tangentially related at best, but I have to make sure I mention as Christmas approaches that we have a nativity scene advent calendar in the kitchen, and the little guy adds a shepherd or farm animal to it every day. He has also rather insistently added an American flag to the manger, waving proudly above the palm trees. I think there’s another metaphor about raising children in the South in there, to boot. But maybe that’s just me.

P.P.S. OK not so much a metaphor as just an easy joke.