Christmas Tree

This afternoon I finally got around to decorating for Christmas. I pulled my Christmas tree out of its place in storage, along with the boxes of ornaments and nativity sets, and set about putting them up.

I love decorating the Christmas tree. There are people who organize their tree decorations according to color scheme, but I am not one of those people. My tree is a mishmash of ornaments of different ages, colors, styles, sizes, and materials. There are little wood figurines next to ceramic spheres, tinfoil symbols next to plastic churches, paper snowflakes next to sparkly pipecleaner shapes. But each one has a story. The tree, with all of the ornaments on it, is like a collection of short stories, since each ornament comes with its own narrative, a snippet of my life and history. And almost all of the ornaments remind me of people.

I was the only person decorating my tree this evening, but I was not alone. As I put up the miniature wooden sled and the puzzle-style Santa face, I thought of Harold, now-deceased neighbor who taught me to do jigsaw puzzles and who carved those ornaments. As I put up the Hallmark ornaments from the 90s, I remembered my parents giving me each of them to commemorate another Christmas celebration. As I put up the tinfoil and pipecleaner ornaments, I thought of my seminary friends, and the evening we spent together making decorations for my bare, Charlie Brown-like Christmas tree in Atlanta. There are ornaments on the tree from my sister, from my high school friends, from my elementary school teachers, from vacations I've taken. There are ornaments donated to me by the friends and kind church folks who heard that I didn't have enough ornaments for the 7.5-foot tall tree I purchased last year.

Here, decorating my tree this evening, I was surrounded by the communion of saints, or at least some of them. These are people from all over the country, and even the world, who are helping others to live and grow in faith. They have sung praises to God with their hands and their gifts, and you can see it in these symbols, these ornaments on the tree. You can argue that buying Christmas trees and ornaments is a sign of the commercialization of Christmas if you want. But on my tree I see songs of praise and signs of love, most of them inexpensive and handmade, but more beautiful, in my sight, than any matching ornaments could be.