It’s official, peeps. I have invited Christmas into my house.
But it’s different this year.
The family unit as we know it is different. What does that mean? Well, Assthew is gone, and that is still a bit sad for me. You know, Christmas is all about family. And my family is one person smaller this year.
But what it meant today was that I had no dude to cut my Christmas tree for me.
Ah, my Christmas tree. It’s my *one* tradition. Every year for at least the past eight years, I have driven to a little village (not big enough to be a town) across the river to find MY tree. And it’s a process. I don’t just choose a tree. I have to browse, walking silently between the rows of trees, looking at them. When I hear a tree whisper to me, then I know it’s my tree. The process is perhaps my most favorite part of the trip.
But I have always had a man with me to do the cutting. I mean, it’s winter. There is still snow on the ground. The ground is wet, with or without the snow. And it’s cold. I am always the designated picture taker, but I walked out of the house without my camera this afternoon. *grumblings*
I had almost talked myself out of the whole process. There are signs everywhere for fresh cut trees. There are quite a few within a ten mile distance of my house, and I was pretty resigned to making a trip to a parking lot, choosing a tree, and coming home. The idea of taking the girls to cut a tree was overwhelming. I mean, I knew it would require twice as much energy for me to shuffle the girls through the tree farm by myself. My mom goes every year, but she always ends up sitting in the truck while my guy and I take care of getting her tree. It just seemed like too much work, going to the farm without a reinforcement.
But I couldn’t do it.
So I started to think that I had gone to the lot owned by my tree farm people. I had done that before when time was running out and I was single. But I wasn’t a mother then.
And that thought lead (or is it “led?” And what’s the difference?) to thoughts of settling for the pine-filled parking lots of my single days. I haven’t done that since motherhood enveloped me.
And those thoughts lead me right back to my tree farm. There are guys there who will cut the trees for you. So I decided that I owed it to myself to uphold my tradition. We would at least go to the farm and I would take my walk through the rows of trees, looking for The One.
I don’t know if anyone understands this, but just deciding to go on with things the way they have always been took a lot of energy. Some differences are small. Other differences loom over us like a cloud, blocking out the sun if we refuse to move from the spot we’re standing. But I’m all about chasing the sun these days, and mainly because I refuse not to be bigger than my shadow.
I decided that we, the girls and I, were going to make it all new this year. Everything is different, so why not turn that around? Why not truly make everything different? Right? So we headed to a store and bought brand new tree ornaments. There will be no old ornaments on my tree this year. The only thing from the past will be the lights.
A few weeks ago we had been in a store and had run across butterfly ornaments. Butterflies are my favorite thing in the world. They are so symbolic to me and so spiritual. If nothing changed there wouldn’t be butterflies. I mean, they start out as just an ugly caterpillar. And then they take it upon themselves to build their cocoons, crawl inside while they transform, then emerge as an astoundingly beautiful creature, ready to perform their duties and fulfill their purposes. Beautiful.
I decided that this year the tree was going to be full of butterflies. However, others had the same idea because when we arrived at the store today, there was one butterfly ornament on the rack. My heart fell because I had such  beautiful visions of my butterfly tree. I hadn’t said a word to the girls about the butterflies, but they knew I was sad when I moaned, “No way. There are no butterflies.” Mak (the youngest) said, “Don’t worry, mama. It makes my heart hurt too. Maybe you should just take a deep breath.” That made me smile. And I took her advice. With a deep breath, I removed the one lone butterfly from the rack, accepting it as a gift from The Universe. At least one butterfly had been left behind.
We chose snowflakes and bulbs in purples and green. It is soooo different from anything I have ever done in the past.
Besides the year, I think I was 24 years old, that my pothead friends and I smoked a fatty and then constructed ornaments for my tree out of aluminum foil, I have always had a what-not tree. Any and every ornament I own went on my tree. And I have the collection of keepsake ornaments from Hallmark, one for each girls’ every Christmas, one for my pregnancy, one for the first Christmas we spent together as a family. And I have Sesame Street ornaments. And the keepsake ornaments that I bought for Charlie that were animated from Hallmark. And I have just pretty little ornaments. And a set of beautiful crystal ornaments that I received from a past friend years and years ago. I loved my what-not tree. I really enjoyed unpacking the ornaments and reliving memories….
But this year I don’t want relive anything. I want to start over. I want to celebrate the fact that I am making huge strides on a spiritual and mental level. I am turning into a butterfly.
And I kept reminding myself of that on my way to the tree farm. I started through the motions: the girls were given the little play saws that the tree farm has every year. I had asked that they send a guy to look for us in a few minutes so he could cut the tree down.
There was a woman with her three daughters cruising along beside us. They saw a tree and cut it down immediately. The woman, much more feminine than I, just got on the ground and began to cut. I watched her and smiled. “Good for her,” I thought, “Sista doing it for herself.” Then I continued on my walk through the rows of trees.
I had found my tree relatively easily. There was even an old bird egg on one of the branches, so I knew it was my tree. Handing the price tag to mom, I was ready to stand there and watch the girls hack away at it with their plastic saws until the guy arrived with the real saw.
Then the woman and her daughters walked by us, tree cut and on a sled. Suddenly that little voice inside said, “What the hell are you doing?” I kind of shook my head to get rid of the voice, but my inner child has always been a little persistent bitch. *grin* “That woman cut her tree down and here you stand, all ‘poor poor Amy without a man.’ I’m just gonna stand here with my daughters and cheat myself out of this because my man went to work 11 months ago and never came home.” Yeah, that little bitch always has had known how to cut me to the bone. So I walked over to the woman with the sled and asked her if I could use her saw.
And I cut down my own tree. Laid right there in the snow and the mud and cut it down. I was about half-way through the trunk when I realized that it was very quiet. I looked up in a panic, wondering where my daughters had run to, when I saw them. They were by my feet, standing side by side. I wish I did have my camera with me because the picture would have been priceless. They were both standing there, as if frozen, staring at me with their mouths wide open. Neither of them were saying a word, just staring at me.
I didn’t know what to say to them so I, still on the ground in the snow and the mud, asked, “Are you going to get your saws and help me?” They just stood there, Mak wanting to nod her head but unable to. So I said, “Well, don’t just stand there staring at me. Cheer me on or something.” And with the little voices of my little chicks chanting, “Go, mama, go!” I cut that tree down.
The guy with the wagon and the saw showed up just as it had fallen to the ground. He grinned at me. I grinned back. He took the tree to the barn to be shaken and wrapped while I walked with my girls, all three of us yielding our saws, smiling the whole way.
I continued to smile all the way home. Yes, I even kept on smiling when the trees (mine and mom’s) flew off the truck and landed in the middle of the interstate. I felt like THE WOMAN, dragging one in each hand across three lanes of traffic, dodging a Hummer and one tractor trailer, hearing my daughters chanting “Go, mama, go!” from the truck. And I laughed out loud as I fought with the Christmas gifts mom had thrown into the back of the truck, even when they had to be moved to her lap so I could load the trees in the truck.
Hell, I’m still smiling. Because things are different this year. It’s going to financially be a poor Christmas, but it doesn’t matter because I’m a butterfly. I’m a butterfly with a tree that I cut down myself and dragged across the interstate. I’m a butterfly that’s raising two little butterflies of her own. Those two little butterflies will grow up knowing that it’s okay to cut down your own tree. And it’s okay if you don’t have a lot of money because the season is about love, a love that should grow and blossom all the year through. And above all else, they will know that mama means it when she says, “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be a little different, baby girls, but it’s going to be okay.”