Broken Traditions

This year brought two broken Christmas traditions. The first we can resume next year, but the other is literally broken.

When it snowed Friday morning, I blamed Roland. I joked that it was his fault for breaking the first tradition, which is to put up the tree the day after Thanksgiving. I’m not sure when we started doing it on that specific day, although it probably began when the children were young. Roland had the day off and my company let us out early, so it seemed like a good time to do it. Before that, we probably bought the tree sometime in December. We have NEVER put it up before Thanksgiving.

Until this year. Roland bought a new tree, and it arrived on Thursday. So rather than taking it to the storage locker for two weeks, he put it up. Actually, we broke tradition in 2011 when we purchased our first artificial one. The house was on the market and had to be kept pristine for showings, and we weren’t sure how well a real tree would work in the condo we wanted to (and did) buy. Since we were empty nesters by that time, I allowed Roland to persuade me to get one that was more practical. I do like the convenience, but I miss the sentiment. Oh well.

Since we already had the tree up, there was no sense leaving it bare. So Roland retrieved the decorations from the storage locker and I began sorting through the ornaments to see which ones I wanted to put on our new—and narrower—tree. A few are not optional—they simply must get hung. One of the required ornaments is the little plastic mouse that I bought in Chicago in 1972 from a bin at Woolworths. I had just graduated from college, it was my first year on my own, and the mouse was my first ornament. He has been on my tree ever since, and the children love him. In fact, I think Caroline expects to inherit him eventually.

But here’s where, or how, the second tradition got broken. When I opened the box of ornaments, the mouse was missing his legs. I didn’t even know he was fragile, but I suppose anything can happen after 45 years. I can’t put him back together, but I can, and did, hang him on my tree in his broken state. If you don’t know what he looked like before and don’t look at him from underneath to see the ragged edges, you wouldn’t know he is damaged. But I was heartsick and still am.

The mouse ornament reminds me that memories are fragile, too. They can be lost if they aren’t written down. Once I’m gone, will my children remember that I bought my first Christmas ornament from Woolworths, which is also gone now? Or will they even know that in those days of living in Chicago I used to buy a real, full-sized tree from a nearby lot and drag it along the sidewalk and up the stairs to my apartment? My roommates helped, but none of us had a car.

Traditions are nice, but broken ones can’t ruin Christmas. The only way to ruin Christmas is to celebrate it without Christ.

Even so, traditions bring us closer, and I like having them.

So I’ve salvaged as much of the mouse as I can.