the family christmas tree

It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving, and I’m heading to my parents’ house. It happened like this: I originally planned to spend Thanksgiving at home, and Christmas with the rest of the family. Then my parents persuaded me to come down for half of Thanksgiving weekend as well. They originally suggested the weekend before Thanksgiving, but that would have interfered with raid.

Apparently, it’s my job to decorate the family Christmas tree on Sunday morning. (Dad announced this on the family group chat.) (Of course there’s a family group chat.) I don’t do any decoration for myself. I gave it a try when I first got my own place. I decided to go for an aesthetic Christmas tree in blue and silver and crystal, instead of my parents’ colorful smorgasbord of ornaments collected over the years. But actually putting up and taking down the tree was too much effort, and I didn’t get a kick out of it when it wasn’t a family thing. I’d put up the tree on, like, December 20, out of a grudging sense of obligation, and wouldn’t get around to taking it down until February. After a couple of years of this I just stopped.

I am the measure of all things in my little world. So whenever I see someone with Christmas decorations, I always have a faint reaction of “huh, people still do that?” even though millions of people worldwide do, in fact, do that every year.

It does look nice. It’s a family tradition. And if we end up spending Christmas at my brother's place (this is still slightly up in the air) then I won’t be around to have to put away the ornaments, which is great.

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The Amtrak station had a gargantuan Christmas tree set up in the main hall, as if to say, Look, this is incredibly normal. It was roughly two stories high. People were constantly taking pictures of it.