A Little Allergic to Pine Trees

Pagan Holiday

Christmas was the holiday we were left out of, our house blank white with its blue shutters and no colored lights, no tree, nothing sparkly. At the choral concert, that last day of school before vacation, where we sang all the songs about hall decking and Bethlehem and Santa’s reindeer there was always that one token Hanukkah song, tucked in the middle, that embarrassed me. Jesus was everywhere. Jesus to me was the wooden statue in the dark corridor of the church where the Girl Scouts met, bloody paint dripping down its arms and from its forehead, wearing a loose diaper; that people worshiped such a thing was terrifying. Cleveland stayed bleak for us in December, the sky and streets and snow all shades of grey, the branches of maples and elms skeletal overhead.

In New York even the Jews have trees. “It’s a pagan holiday,” my husband would say, which is no doubt what his mother said to him. “It’s Christ’s birthday, and you’re Jewish,” I would say. I gave him shit about the tree, it being a betrayal of his heritage, his history; what was wrong with his mother, a renowned psychoanalyst and Jew with a nostalgia fondness for the Tyrolean Alps, fatherland of Nazis, though her younger brother died in Auschwitz? But he grew up with a tree, owned decaying historic ornaments, a scary rubber elf with a rubbed off face, for example, and anyway he didn’t believe in God, so he could not be an apostate of anything. He continued to love Christmas despite my bitching at him about it, and the years went by, and in one of them I surprised him by buying and decorating a tree, albeit a very small one. And I had to admit, the lights were so pretty in the bleak winter.

My best oldest friend took me to see an Alvin Ailey performance, this week, and in the final dance of the program one segment was performed to Etta James’s “At Last,” the song my new husband and I danced to for the first dance at our wedding, and I sobbed in the dark for the rest of the show and on the way home, bought a small tree from the French Canadian guy on 9^th Avenue and 57^th, and a stand. I ordered the ornaments and lights from Door Dash. New York City! Where you can bring your tree home in a yellow cab and have your pretty lights delivered. And I feel a little bad now, for my years-long stance about the tree; one of many things I accused him of or alleged or made an argument out of over 25 years that I did not need to say; though my kids would say: He loved that about you, that you gave him a hard time.

I think I may be a little allergic to pine trees; and I am as Jewish as ever, but when my daughter and I finished decorating the tree we stood back from it and agreed: It was pretty. He would have loved it.