That December We’ll Leave the Tree Up
How the holidays rehearse hope.
Traffic jams. Burnt-out bulbs. Missing ornament hooks. Bake-offs that put Paul Hollywood to shame. Paper cuts. Return lines. The marks of wear and tear after hauling boxes from attics, running umpteen grocery errands, detangling string lights, finding something — anything — for your dad that isn’t a gift card yet again, trimming the tree.
TBH, the days between 34th Street and Times Square border paradox.
We do all of this just to throw the tree to the curb, do our best to Tetris the storage containers how we unpacked them and welcome a bleak midwinter.
Why? Hope.
In December 1914, troops from France, Germany, Belgium and Britain paused fighting for days within the “The War to End All Wars” with an impromptu cease-fire over the holiday.
We’ve romanticized it with our songs about Snoopy and the Baron wishing each other from their pilot seats friend-filled Merry Christmases, but imagine it: pausing to celebrate and cherish shared traditions and wonders and carols by firesides before going back into the trenches to mow one another down with bullets and bigotry.
It’s a lot like Christmas.
We are in a few short weeks where much of the day-to-day feels a little brighter — and it’s not just your neighbor’s home serving as a rendition of Van Gogh’s Starry Night or the ending you’ve seen every single night on Hallmark that still gives butterflies.
We take the ordinary, taken-for-granted relationships in life and elevate them to prominence. Loved ones reconnect. Needs and dreams are listed. Good tidings are shared beyond the basic “Hey.”
For me, even in the midst of five of the last seven holidays including deaths and funerals within my immediate family, I get a glimpse of all that is sad untrue, all that is wrong righted, all that is cursed made joyful.
It’s not just through Christmas; the holidays of December rehearse hope beyond odds manifesting itself with the lighting of the Menorah and prayers for the miracles, hope through unity holding the principles of ujima and ujamaa and the communal cup of Kwanzaa.
Then January 1st arrives. The airwaves return to the greatest hits. Commercial breaks are all about how unwell you are. The candles go out. The protests resume. The cease-fire ends.
I’ve always found it hard to consider men pausing from war only to take up arms again — until this year. I see now what I think they saw: hope.
Christmas is a rehearsal of hope that even briefly holds back decay, darkness and occupation by the Accuser. These traditions add beauty to the mundane. Lights on tarnished wood. Evergreens among creation’s hibernation.
They are the harbingers of the divine clothing dust, the heralds of wonder moving into the neighborhood of our weariness.
Beyond the politics, division, oppression, groanings, separated families, fled homes, suicide notes, epidurals, stillbirths and scattered ashes — there is humanity not at odds with all that makes us human. It’s like a mirage of what we long for, a mural of what our souls speak of being possible.
We get glimpses of a child leading wolf and lamb, leopard and calf, lion and yearling in the wonder of children’s eyes Christmas morn. Our ears perk to the sounds of that procession in the carol of the bells. Then the skirmishes continue.
We need these repetitions. We need these reminders of the story that gets the better word even when tomorrow I fight for a future that doesn’t seem my own, a city that feels like I will never call home.
Joy to the World ironically casts itself as a carol of Advent when it actually invites to the present moment hope for the future realities of a final Advent that all these others merely rehearse.
So, I pull out the stockings only to pack them away. I restring the lights and sing “It’s the Most Wonderful Time.” I cut and plant to cut again. Because one day, they will stay unpacked; one day, the tree will stay up.
