O Tannebaum

As the Northbrook Santa Claus parade day approaches, past Christmas celebrations and events come to mind. The sweetest, most poignant one for me happened on December 23, 1988.

Back then, I was a newly divorced single mom with 3 young boys - actually they were 14, 12 and 9.  I was busy back then - a full time job,  and a full time landlord and boy wrangler. Man, it was hard keeping track of those kids. We had moved from Markham to Pickering just 6 months before, so I was still in the throes of getting the house fixed up (and did it ever need fixing). Locating the boxes with the Christmas stuff was a bit of a challenge as they were stored under the stairs and the access was in my tenant's apartment. 

The boys really wanted to get that Christmas tree up and decorated, but getting access to the tree and decorations didn't seem to be happening. About a week before Christmas, my tenant's schedule and mine jived and the boxes were retrieved. And plunked down in our living room where they sat. As each night passed, there were other things to do. Shopping, wrapping gifts, cleaning, baking - those other Christmas activities just got in the way. Matty, my youngest, really wanted to get the tree up but there just didn't seem to be enough hours in the day to get it done. 

Finally, on the evening of December 23rd, Matty said he would put it together and decorate it by himself. So that sweet little 9 year old got started. I was in the kitchen preparing food for our family's Christmas shindig that I hosted on Christmas Eve, so I heard him busy at work in the living room. He wouldn't let me in until it was finished, but he did call out for some instructions on how to assemble the tree early on in the evening.

Around 11:00 pm, he came into the kitchen and said it was done - and was the most beautiful tree ever! I wish I had taken a photo. The tree was desgned to be put together in sections - 8 in all - and the trunk and branches were labelled A through H correspondingly, A being the top of the tree, and the branches getting progressively larger. The H branches were the longest at about 3 feet long. Matty, bless him, had put the branches in the tree trunk randomly. There was an H branch where an  itty bitty B branch slot, B branches were in the D slots. It had to be the most adorable, unbalanced tree ever. Each branch had the lights tightly wound around them. "So they wouldn't fall off", I was told. 

Standing proudly in front of it, my bleary eyed little boy said, "Isn't it the most beautiful tree we ever had?" I agreed with him, mentally thinking I was going to be up until 3 AM fixing it. And that's what I did. I am a self confessed perfectionist and that tree had to be perfect. Christmas wouldn't be Christmas unless it was.

So, I slowly took down all the decorations, unwound the lights, rearranged the branches, put the lights and the decorations back on, and stumbled into bed around 3:30 am, where I got a few hours sleep before I had to get up to go to work.

Matty got up early the next morning, Christmas eve, and went in to look at "his" tree. I could hear him running down the hall coming towards my room. He burst in exclaiming, "Mommy, the tree is even more beautiful this morning! Come and see." That precious boy didn't even realize I had changed it.

I wish I had a "before" photo of that special tree. Actually, to this day, I wish I had never changed it. It was the most special tree ever.