Christmas Decorations
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| photo: Eric Diesel |
It took a few more days than usual to recuperate after
Thanksgiving this year. Between the election and work and outside relationships
being everything from disappointing to turbulent, November was just plain weird.
John and I closed out the month with a rare lapse of productivity in our urban
home. We spent most of Thanksgiving weekend beached on the sofa, comforting
ourselves with Thanksgiving leftovers, old movies, coffee, and Scotch. We
engaged much less with social media, agreeing to table the smartphones during
movie time and checking them regularly during the day rather than hovering over
them constantly. We used some of the time won back by catching up on our reading
-- Pema Chodron for John, Raymond Chandler for me. By the time Sunday night
arrived, we were recharged in mind, spirit, and smartphone battery.
During the week that followed, as we got to it, we began
unpacking and setting out our holiday decorations. I've written before about
Christmas and about taking your time with it. As noted in that column, I have
rushed through the holidays as a shopper, a crafter, a decorator, a cook, a
worker, a host, a guest . . . whew. I enjoyed the bustle, the special nip of
city air filling the lungs, as I plowed through Christmas in New York like an
Olympic heat. I loved, and still sometimes miss, Macy's Herald Square,
Balducci's, the Jane Street tree stand, parties in skyscrapers and brownstones
and apartment buildings, festive date nights in Chelsea, moseying through TheVillage, and, yes, snow. I will always treasure those times, but the fact is that they are
memories. New York has changed so much that I would miss it even if I was still there. What I have for New York is no longer connection, it is nostalgia.
I believe utterly in nostalgia, but I also know that it is
best placed as sentiment. John and I have almost ten storage bins of holiday decor (quite a lot for two men who have always lived in apartments) and that is
what is contained in them: sentiment. That is why we don't rush the unpacking.
It is not just because lessening the pressure of the holiday season is
healthier, although it is; it is because every ornament we unwrap, every holiday
decoration we place, is a vessel for memory. The ornaments we bought at the
very beginning, when money was tight but we wanted to memorialize our first Christmas
together. Those we sought out as we grew into our lives, became collectors who journeyed
from storefront card shops in The Village to the vast Hallmark store in
Rockefeller Center. A stash of felted reindeer from an honest to goodness five
and dime that was still operating on a then-nonhip street in then-nonhip Brooklyn. Figural glass ornaments from a side street antiquities shop in Chelsea.
Strings of vintage lights and kitschy holiday doodads from Little Ricky, Las
Venus, Howdy Do, Atomic Passion, Reminiscence. Stacks of holiday CDs from Tower
Records and Amoeba.
Holiday decorations form a mosaic of the history of our life
together; mementoes that crystallize the endurance of our marriage. That's not
unimportant for, I suppose, any couple, but it has specific implications for
glbtq* people. Like many, often we can't or don't want to return to our families
of origin during a trying time of the year. Moreover, our relationships --
especially marriages -- still are so often consigned to second class,
unimportance, disavowal. One way or another, glbtq+ people have to fight for
everything we have. Sometimes the fight breaks us. It always leaves wounds. We
don't consign broken decorations to the trash; we retain them with full honors.
Some ornaments didn't survive the move west. Two figural resin ornaments
arrived shattered in their original packaging. Painfully fitting, as they were from
the Warner Brothers superstore, when John had a part-time job there ages
ago. That store was a glass-enclosed tourist magnet that was the first place
you saw when you exited the subway belowground at the World Trade Center.
In December 2012, so bleary-eyed I hardly knew what I was
doing, I boarded a red-eye flight from JFK to LAX. That day had been my last at
a corporation where I had, to my surprise, worked for almost twenty years. It
had been an exhausting few weeks as I navigated the exit process from a job, a
home, New York City life, at the tail end of a long year of bicoastal living. I
still remember turning the keys to lock our apartment in Astoria as the cab
idled outside. It weighed heavily upon my mind that this would be our first
Christmas together outside of New York City. I envy people who can sleep on
planes because frankly that night I could have used it. By the time the
descent, now familiar, commenced over the CalNeva border, the lights of LasVegas behind us and those of Los Angeles on the horizon, I had written two columns and drunk way too much rancid airplane coffee, and was as ready as I
was going to be for Christmas in LA.
The plan was for John and I to spend Christmas and New Year's in Los Angeles, and then for me to take a well-deserved break during
January to lounge around in sunshine rather than combat blizzards. I figured
that sometime around February, I'd work my way back to New York to start the
process of divorcing myself from the city. John had already done so; he had
become a card-carrying Angeleno within months. For me, it wasn't so simple. He
knew that, and he knew what this journey meant with an emotional intelligence I
lack. When we got to our sweet, small apartment in Hollywood, I found waiting a
tree, fairy-lit with white lights. John had gotten it after work and set it up
while I was airborne. He had set out the surprise stash of ornaments we had stumbled
upon that summer when we ducked into a mall in Culver City to partake of the air
conditioning.
That tiny tree is in our study now, same white lights
atwinkle as I write this. We set up this tree and decorate it with German glass
with the same sentiment as the bigger tree in the living room and the twenty-five years' worth of collectibles we place thereupon. This is our fifth Christmas in
Los Angeles, and this is but one of the traditions that have evolved as solidly
as they did in New York. We stop by The Abbey a few times during the season, to
partake of the red and green cheer of our community center. Powerfully,
meaningfully, The Abbey holds its tree-lighting ceremony on World AIDS Day. The
three-story tree is decorated by go-go boys who fling on the ornamentation as
if playing basketball and gimlet-eyed and -filled design queens who critique and
appreciate the proceedings simultaneously. A couple of years ago, we stumbled
somewhat blotto through Koontz Hardware around the corner. In this old-school
overstocked emporium John discovered, among the tinsel trees and Three Kings
lawn figures and cans of spray snow, a stash of old-fashioned bubble lights and
the remembrance of his affection for them. Since then, we have lit our living room
tree with them. The sudden, potent memory from childhood also reminded John of
his childhood train set, and so another tradition is for him to set up a
holiday train under those bubbling lights.
I apologize to anyone who thought this was going to be an
explanatory column about how to perfectly string lights in order to impeccably
position ornamentation upon a tree that anyone who saw it would envy. There are
other resources for that, and I, for one, don't believe that perfection, and
certainly not envy, has any place in the holidays. I've said it before, as
recently as a few paragraphs above: I have done all of that. No judgies against
anyone whose style it is to inhabit or to purvey, but I no longer believe in
Christmas perfection. In fact, lifestyle writer notwithstanding, I am against
it. Some enjoy the quest for flawlessness, but when that quest takes over, it
kills the joy. I don't care if the placement of the lights is not
trigonometrically defensible; I don't care if the ornaments are tacky and their
placement is slapdash. The lesson I learned through all of those years of
hardcore Christmasing is that the best Christmas is the enjoyable one, the one
that brings you together with your love(s). That first Christmas in LA? We
spent it in utter quietude, with nothing but that small tree, lit brightly but
decorated sparely, while twenty years of holiday history sat safely locked away on the other side of the country. I don't think we've ever been closer.
That was the beginning of our lives in Los Angeles, now five
Christmasses deep. At the beginning of our relationship, when funds were tight
as they often are for couples starting out, John and I were living in Brooklyn. We found the money to buy a
small tree from one of the local everything-shops that borough neighborhoods
specialize in. We also bought a keepsake ornament to memorialize our first
Christmas together. That Christmas receded into the mists of time as they all
do, but every time we unpack that special item, we both feel the hopeful,
fearful beauty of starting out along with the power of having sustained. Christmas decorations are magical objects, imbued with significance upon first display
that accumulates with every reopening, every placement ever after. It is a
reminder that Christmas is magic and that sentiment is the conveyance of the
magickal power of Christmas. Individual and family traditions are our singular
connection to Christmas magic, but Christmas is a connection to Yule. That is
where the true power resides: in the icy core of the winter forest, the
diamond-strewn velvet of a starlit midnight, the gift of hope and the resolve to sustain it, on the longest,
coldest, and prettiest night of the year.
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