O, TANNENBAUM!
Christmas trees have been part of my life since I was a baby. One of my earliest memories is the scent of pine sap from the fresh-cut tree brought into the little basement apartment where my parents first lived after I was born. World War Two was still on. The war lingers in my mind as nothing but a vaguely ominous blur, but when I think of it, I also think of Christmas, thanks to the lingering resinous tang of the tree.
My family was nominally Episcopalian, but not particularly observant, except when my mother fell into one of her black moods and began dragging the rest of us to the most formal, ceremonious Episcopal Church she could find. During my childhood my father’s job dictated that we had to move on the average of once every two years, which partly explained my mother’s bouts of religiosity. In every place we fetched up, she’d find a grand neo-Gothic “Smoking Episcopalian” church, so called because the services involved priests and altar boys in lace dresses swinging fuming pots of incense on long chains, and all the other trappings of the Roman Catholic Mass except the Latin liturgy and obedience to a Pope. Even when I was very young I was never bored. The pageantry of the High Anglican Mass dazzled me, the organ music and choral singing was haunting, and the smell of the incense reminded me of Christmas trees, even on a Sunday in August.
As I grew up I went on loving the trappings of Christmas in particular, and of Christianity in general, which is why I minored in medieval studies in college (medieval history is the history of the Catholic church, inevitably, warts and all), even though I’d given up believing in the Baby Jesus at about the same time I’d stopped expecting reindeer hooves on the roof – although I have a vivid memory from a Christmas Eve when I was nine years old, during which I sang, quietly, every Christmas carol I knew, in my bed on the second floor of the cramped little house we lived in then, not so much to summon Santa or Baby Jesus, as to drown out the raging of my mother and father downstairs.
They were trimming the Christmas tree, or trying to, and they were both drunk. Back then Christmas lights were wired in such a way that if one bulb went out, the whole string died. Both my father and mother drank a lot, especially during the Christmas season. They were old-school Waspians, and booze was just part of Gracious Living. It was the time when the Little Woman was supposed to welcome her hard-working husband home to the house each evening with a freshly-made Martini, after she’d spent most of her empty afternoon cooking dinner and knocking back the gin herself. Neither of them had a clue at the time that they were both alcoholics, and of course neither did I. I just wanted them to stop screaming at each other, figure out how to replace the goddamn dead bulb, and finish trimming the goddamn tree so that I could get back to sleep and wake up in the morning to parents who weren’t divorced yet. And yes, at nine I already said “goddamn.” Also “shit” and “fuck” and “bitch” and “bastard.” Overheard lyrics to a hard tune I’d memorized, not exactly a Christmas carol.
But that night I sang “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “We Three Kings, “Silent Night,” and of course the English translation of “O, Tannenbaum” (it would take me a few more years to learn the original German lyrics, which are subtly different). I knew all the verses, and I sang the carols over and over again to make the angry voices go away, until my throat was raw and I gave up and finally went to sleep. And in the morning the tree was trimmed, and there were presents, and there were Mum and Dad, hungover and grumpy, but still together. And the tree looked magical: a brushy cone almost touching the ceiling with its golden star, so hung about with glass and metal balls, elaborate ornaments handed down from both my mother’s and my father’s families, ropes of tinsel and glass icicles, and my mother’s own creations (sequins and varicolored bands of ribbon fixed to styrofoam balls), that I could barely see the limbs and trunk of the tree itself. It was a vast, glittering presence in our cramped living room, almost a living being. Despite its dense ornamentation, it still smelled ravishingly of the wild woods.
My parents finally divorced a year or so later, and they both remarried pretty quickly. Dad married the glamorous blonde Mum had caught him screwing, and Mum, a little later, married her college sweetheart, the man she’d been seeing before Dad swept into her life, all dash and flashing eyes and wingèd words. Of course there were Christmas trees in both homes my younger brother and I were shifted between every holiday season. Dad’s blonde had money of her own, and the trees in her grand North Carolina vacation house were monster spruces decorated by professionals. They were a little on the glitzy side, and I missed my mother’s home-made ornaments and the cranky old too-big lights wired in series which went out from time to time. But the trees, ostentatious as they were, always smelled unmistakably of Christmas, and the blonde woman was always kind to me and my little brother.
The trees my mother and her new husband set up in the various places where they lived – for my step-father also had a job that pushed him around a lot – were more modest, but they sported the old ornaments, and I liked them better. Unfortunately, for a number of years they also had the ancient series-wired strings of Christmas lights, and although my step-father was a kinder, more responsible and generally less bumptious man than my father, he was also an echt Waspian and partook of a good deal of holiday cheer on Christmas Eve – although not as much as mother did. And the two of them generally picked fights over the tree-trimming, so things really hadn’t changed much. True, my step-father was seldom as drunk as mother on those fraught Eves: he’d usually react to my mother’s rising volume as she recited a litany of complaints (few of which had much do with the actual goddamn tree) by retreating into the cellar, if the house we lived in had one big and comfortable enough for his home shop. He was good with his hands, and he’d leave Mother to her Christmas demons while he made something or repaired something or just sharpened and polished his tools and made sure they were in good order and hung exactly in their proper places.
As a result, during those years – in Massachusetts, California, and Québec – the trees were a bit of a mess on Christmas morning, Mother having slung a few wads of tinsel at them before retreating to the bedroom to finish her last drink and pass out. Of course there were presents, always; and often my step-father would get up early and try to make the trees look more respectable. I appreciated his effort, to be sure, although he was never a man I got along with very well.
By then I was spending most of my time away, first at boarding school, later at college, and in the summers apprenticing at theaters as I pursued my dream of becoming an actor. Christmas was about the only time I saw the man, and I think it suited both of us: he didn’t like what he thought of as my lax bohemian ways, and I thought he was an unimaginative square. For the most part we agreed to disagree, and were formally polite to one another.
But there was a Christmas season, during one of the years we spent in Canada, when even the tree’s balsamic blessing couldn’t smooth over an eruption of terrible rage. I was nineteen, on Christmas vacation from my first year in college, and a girl I loved in the little Canadian town told me one evening that she didn’t want to see me any more. She was a year older than me, already in her second year at McGill, and she had another boyfriend. She was kind about it, and she even raided her parents’ liquor cabinet and got us both a little drunk before she announced the break-up.
I managed to say goodnight to her reasonably graciously, but on the walk home on that pure, cold, clear night, with a gibbous moon casting blue shadows across the snow – “deep and crisp and even,” as in the old carol – I burst into tears, sobbing like a child, falling down several times, getting up, and finally howling, with the tears and snot freezing on my face. My mother and step-father and brother and oldest half-brother were tucked up all snug in their beds, and my step-father, always sensible, had shut the furnace down to dead low. I ramped in, still blubbering, half-frozen and half-drunk, and the chill in the downstairs rooms infuriated me. The Christmas tree was set up in the living room, but its lights were off. I turned them back on, and of course another of the series-wired bulbs had blown, killing the rest of the lights on its string, so there was a black winding gash in the spirals of light around the tree. The imperfection further enraged me. Without bothering to take off my snow boots and heavy parka, I stole a bottle of bourbon from the liquor cabinet and built a huge fire in the fireplace. I was at least three massive slugs into the bottle, trying to replace the dead bulb in the string by the light of the fire I had lit, which was roaring up the chimney and spitting sparks on the carpet, when my mother and step-father confronted me.
When my mother began to yell at me I went mad. I screamed curses at her and ran into the kitchen; when she followed me I pulled a carving-knife out of a drawer and waved it at her. I’m not sure if I was really serious about cutting her, but I was a good-sized boy, and she retreated around the kitchen table. I was already beginning to feel seriously stupid, but she was still raging at me, so we got into a ghastly, absurd little roundy-round dance which went on until my step-father, a strong man several inches taller than I was, managed to grapple with me and get the knife away.
Whereupon I turned on him. I grabbed him under the armpits and actually lifted him up and threw him against the kitchen wall, a feat I certainly could not have accomplished under normal circumstances. He was stunned, though not much hurt, but meanwhile my mother had gotten to the phone and was howling into it. I ran blindly into the living room, thinking to escape through the front door into the snow. But the booze and adrenalin caught up with me, and I puked and fell down. My step-father jumped on top of me, trying to subdue me or at least silence the curses I was screaming.
The town where we lived was generally peaceful, and too small to have a regular police department, so a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who answered mother’s call. I can remember feeling a little disappointed that he was wearing a blue parka and a fur cap, instead of the scarlet tunic and wide-brimmed hat the Mounties wore in the movies, before the doctor he’d brought with him injected me with something and I passed out.
I was not arrested. It was still the early Sixties, and the small Québec town, a little Scots-English enclave of eminently respectable middle-management executives surrounded by French-Canadian communities, regarded murderous brawls like the one I had started with my mother and step-father as embarrassing – the sort of stuff one expected from the “Frogs”, but not from a decent white-collar family of Americans who had been granted landed immigrant status and were friends with all the old Anglophone pillars of the community. The Mountie went away without filing charges, and after a very grim two or three days, I went back to college. My freak-out had preceded me, and I was ordered to see a therapist from the university’s Department of Mental Hygiene twice a week until I was certified sane enough to go on being a normally deranged college student. I was faithful about keeping my appointments, at first, but I finally got bored. The therapist was a Freudian, and he kept asking me about my dreams. At the time I didn’t remember them, and I finally began making some up. He was fascinated by my inventions, and took a lot of notes.
After a couple of months I stopped showing up. The shrink never complained to the university authorities, or to my mother and stepfather, and I was left alone to finish my college years without interferences or interventions. I was already deeply involved with acting, spending so much of my time performing in plays in the university’s undergraduate drama group that my studies suffered. My Dean eventually gave me permission to major in drama, something the university didn’t offer to undergraduates officially in those days. I expect he mostly wanted to get shut of me without actually flunking me out.
I did become a professional actor, and I married an actress I had met in summer stock. Her mother was an Italian-American, widowed early, and she always had a splendid, gorgeously ornate Christmas tree laden with ornaments which had been borne across the Atlantic decades before from the town in Calabria where her own mother had been born. There were never any fights over the trimming of the tree: my young wife and I drank a little red wine while her mother, her younger sisters and her brother put the ornaments on. Everyone went to bed early, and got up early Christmas morning to open presents and help my wife’s mother start the ragù, a rump-roast of beef in a deep pot with peeled and crushed tomatoes, onions, garlic, basil and a chopped carrot, with a wineglass or two of good vino rosso. In southern Italian tradition the ragù simmers on very low heat for as long as it takes to attend morning Mass, and my wife’s mother followed that rule, taking the younger children, even though her oldest daughter and I did not accompany her, a source of some chagrin to that good woman. I have never forgotten the enchanting mingled aromas in that house on Christmas morning: the smell of the simmering ragù on the stove blending with the pine-sap scent of the tree. To this day, even though my first wife and I divorced amicably in the early 70s, I try to cook an Italian-American Christmas dinner, the rich tomato sauce served over pasta as a first course, and the beef, reduced to half its original size but dense with flavor, as the main course. I’m always tempted to substitute Greek retsina for the Italian red wine, to get the tang of the Christmas tree into the meal. But I don’t have to.
Later on I took up with a red-headed woman I’d known since she was a child, and we are still married. We spend part of our time in New Hampshire, where we have a cabin in what we still call the woods, even though our Monadnock Region is steadily turning into suburban housing. But we have a big tract of wetland forest that can’t be developed even if we wanted to. It was last logged-over about sixty years ago. When we first moved into the cabin in 1987, we cut raggedy “Charlie Brown” Christmas trees in our woods to bring into the mead-house and trim for the ancient pagan holiday. But nowadays we generally get our Tannenbaums from a local cut-your-own Christmas tree farm, Scotch pines and balsam firs, their limbs cut back into perfect pyramidal shapes. Inevitably I have to curse and roar while I try to hack the trunk of each season’s tree to fit it into the cranky tree-stand, but I do it outside on the porch, and so far I have never had a serious argument with my wife about the tree-trimming. Christmas lights today are better wired, and we have boxes of treasured ornaments, from both our families: my mother’s sequined styrofoam balls, my wife’s mother’s wooden angels and stuffed cloth hobby-horses, and an angel made of straw my oldest brother gave me thirty-five years ago.
Even though we have no children, we “keep Christmas,” as Dickens wrote. I’m not quite sure why. We’re both well into middle-age – oh, the hell with that, we’re getting old. But we still make a fuss out of the Christmas season. We buy one another too many presents, but they are always useful, since we know one another so well by now. And we buy our two cats (yeah, our child-surrogates) special toys and treats. And we sit around the Tannenbaum on Christmas morning opening the presents we have given one another, and inhaling the resinous tang from the tree, and thinking that yes, something has been born, or reborn, and spring will return again this year.