Decorating a Tree with Skye: A Christmas Story
I made the tin-foil star and placed it atop the tree. Otherwise, Skye did all the work.
HO-HO-HOBOKEN, DECEMBER 12, 2024. Nothing counteracts the holiday blues like my kids coming to Hoboken to help me get a tree. This year Mac gets a cold, he can’t come. Too bad, Mac, who runs a tree-care business in Newburgh, is an expert tree picker.
Skye is getting over flu herself, but she still wants to come, she doesn’t think she’s contagious anymore. She looks thin and pale when she arrives from Brooklyn, and she coughs hoarsely. But she’s up for walking six blocks to the tree lot behind Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church.
We choose a balsam fir that’s big but not too big, ideal for my cozy one-bedroom apartment. As one tough-looking Italian guy wraps the tree in plastic mesh, I give another tough-looking Italian guy ten $20 bills for the tree and a wreath for Vicki, my Jersey City friend. Yeah, inflation has hit the tree market hard.
Skye asks if I need help carrying the tree. No, it’s light! I assure her, hoisting it onto my shoulder. Skye carries the wreath. As we walk back to my building, the tree gets heavier, and I keep shifting it from one shoulder to the other. Folks we pass smile indulgently at the old guy lugging home a Christmas tree with his daughter.
Back in my apartment, I put the green plastic tree stand in front of my living-room window and jam the tree into it. Skye and I fiddle with the tree until it stands up straight. I hack at the tree’s plastic-mesh wrapping with a Swiss army knife. Skye finds scissors and quickly completes the task.
Once we pull off the mesh, the branches unfold. It’s a perfect tree, Skye and I agree, just the right shape, and oh, the smell. Mac would surely approve. Yeah, the perfection is phony, men grew and trimmed this tree to be chopped down and sold. But I’m okay with that, I’ve come to terms with the contradictions of Christmas in a capitalist culture.
We need a soundtrack for decorating the tree. I choose a Nat King Cole album I bought from the used-CD place on Washington Street. No one does Christmas schmaltz like the Velvet Voice.
I order The Don, a pizza loaded with meat, from Grimaldi’s. The Don is part of our tree ritual.
I’m not using the weird old bubble lights that Emily gave me years ago, those will make me sad. I’m going with conventional lights I bought at CVS. Skye approves.
Another decision: Wrap lights all the way around the tree, starting from the bottom and moving up? Or zigzag lights across the side of the tree facing the living room, to maximize coverage? It’s a mathematical puzzle, if you think about it: the benefits of a 2D versus 3D grid.
Circle the tree, Skye says. Yes, that’s best, I agree. I start stringing lights as Skye lounges on the couch, advising me on placement. Then she takes over as I watch. She does a great job spacing the lights throughout the tree, so there are no dark spots.
I’ve always been a control freak when it comes to decorating Christmas trees, because I think no one can do it as well as I can, certainly not my kids. Yet another illusion I’m abandoning with age.
Skye takes ornaments one by one from my Xmas tchotchke box and hangs them on the tree. My best ornaments, I realize, were gifts from Emily: Santa, Buddha, the alien, the asteroid, the girl and boy robots, the soldier, the bulbs with peace signs painted on them. Every ornament has a backstory.
The Don arrives. As we gobble slices, I tell Skye about my first Christmas away from home, 1975. I had dropped out of college and hitchhiked to Denver to live with Darlene. We were broke, but late on Christmas Eve I ran out and found a drug store with one tree left for, like, five bucks. It was a scrawny Charlie Brown tree, but it made Darlene happy. Skye smiles and nods as though she hasn’t heard this story before.
After I sent her this column, Dar sent me this photo of her tree. On the right, if you look carefully, you can see two ornaments Dar and I made out of eggs in Denver in the 1970s.
We reminisce about getting trees when we all lived together in Garrison. One year we bought a tree from that tree farm off Route 9, just around the corner from us. The owner was the father of Skye’s classmate, Julie. A gruff guy, defiantly odd, wore shorts right through winter. After Mac, Skye and I picked a tree, Julie’s dad cut it down and wrapped it for us while we sipped hot chocolate in a shed.
Weird what happened to Julie’s dad, shot dead by a robber and left in a snowbank at the side of Route 9. When was that? Skye thinks it was New Year’s Eve, 2008. Google confirms it. December 31, 2008, was also the night I moved out of our Garrison house into an apartment in Cold Spring. Sad, but things work out in the end.
I ask about Skye’s friends, like the trans man I met a few years ago, who’s into polyamory. We debate whether polyamory lives up to its hype or is just rationalized sluttiness. Skye favors the latter view.
To my surprise, she says she wants to get married and have a kid. First she has to meet the right person, who must be okay with giving their kid her last name. A hyphenated name is okay, but it must end with “Horgan.” Yes, I say, the world needs more Horgans!
Not long ago, Skye was adamant that she’d never have kids, because she didn’t think humanity had a future. I’m glad she’s changed her mind, even though the world is arguably darker than ever.
The sun set hours ago, Skye’s yawning, she orders an Uber. I unplug the Christmas lights, and we walk out together to wait for her car. As we stand in front of my building, I can’t decide if I feel really good or really bad.
When Skye’s car pulls up, we hug and say, Love you! I don’t do this with anyone else. Then, carrying the wreath I got for my friend, I start walking through the cold, clear night toward Jersey City.
Further Reading:
Quantum Mechanics and the Holiday Blues