3 - 16/ Places: Under the Christmas Tree

1952, age 9: Newly motherless and too young to fully appreciate the effort it must have taken my dad to have a tree and gifts that year, I sat around the tree with him and several neighbors and exclaimed, "Just what I always wanted" with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, which wasn't much.

1959, age 16:  It was Christmas Eve, and I was dressed up to go out. I turned out the living room lights and sat looking at the lighted tree with its shimmering tinsel and glass ornaments. It seemed so magical, so holy. I was filled with wonder and the delicious anticipation of the fun I was going to have with my friends.

1965, age 22: That September I'd gotten married, and the next day my parents moved to Florida. Joe and I drove down there to spend our first married Christmas with them. I was shocked to find they'd put up a table-top tree. It was hard to imagine Christmas without a full-size, live (but not for long) tree.

1966:  The next year we flew to Bermuda to spend Christmas with his mother. Her cook made a traditional English cake with a silver charm inside. It was supposed to bring good luck, but someone nearly choked on it. I don't remember a tree, but I think there must have been one.

1968:  We still lived in Manhattan, but this was our first Christmas in our little weekend house in the country. The house may have been small, but our tree was BIG. We drank Bloody Marys as we opened our presents Christmas morning, and then we went back to bed.

1977: We'd been in our old farmhouse two years, and our daughters were 4 and 2. Instead of putting up the tree a week or more in advance, we thought it would be fun to bring it into the house Christmas Eve after the girls were asleep and surprise them with it in the morning. I was used to being productive in the evening, but not at that level. Decorating the tree took forever, it seemed, and then all the presents had to be retrieved from their hiding places and arranged under the tree. The temperature outside went down to minus 28 F.; I don't think it's gotten that low since. Christmas morning, the girls looked mildly startled. With an emphasis on mild.

1978:  The most treasured present under the tree was our 2-month-old baby boy. His two "little mothers," ages 3 and 5, thought so too.

1986 (maybe):  At some point when the kids were all school-age, I started having Christmas parties for people who liked to sing. Of course we sang Christmas songs. We never tired of them. It was such a nice tradition. There was plenty for the non-singing spouses to eat, and the singers gathered round the piano. I even met one of my best friends that way, when she heard about the parties and asked a mutual friend to get her invited. Good times.

2000: My daughter Gillian was my partner in Christmas. She took such joy in it. We decorated the tree together, and she examined the presents underneath, trying to figure out what was in them. Every morning she or I put butter on the kitchen counter for that day's batch of cookies. My husband's dementia had made a lot of progress in five years, but "we are all together," Gillian said with love and gratitude.

And then we weren't.

2002: Christmas at Suzanne's house. Feeling so grateful for her and her brother, and for my granddaughter. It snowed hard that day, a blizzard.

2003:  Christmas Eve at the nursing home. Suzanne and Liz and I wore red, and I photographed a spectacular sunset on the way home. Everything else was different.

2005: Life goes on, and things change. My nuclear family wasn't nuclear anymore as my kids acquired significant others and their families. They were growing, and I was shrinking. I had a hard time with this at first.

2017: I was recovering from late November surgery but I had no shortage of Christmas spirit. I bought another Nordic looking pencil tree to add to the one I had, and I displayed my small collection of crystal stemware with electronic tea lights flickering inside. My grandsons and their mom and I painted a wooden tree and hot-glued antique buttons on it for ornaments. And I made two big lighted stars out of yardsticks--one for each of my kids.

2018: I haven't had a live tree since Jill was with us. Over the years since then I've put up fake trees of modest size--including a table-top tree on the piano. Because my little grandsons live nearby, I've made an effort to do at least some decorating for Christmas. But while I put lights on the porch as usual this year, and hung a wreath, somehow the trees never left the attic.