A Tale of Three Christmas Trees

Hello Love and Laundry Readers,

I live in a house with three Christmas trees.

Two of these trees are beautiful, festive and normal. “Regular normal,” as my kids used to say.

One of them is not.

Over the years, I’ve tried to emulate the Christmas trees I see in the Ballard Designs and Front Gate catalogs. I stuff the branches with fun things I find at Michaels, like fake birds and fake poinsettias and pics and spikes and spears and beads and glass ornaments from HomeGoods.

By the time I’m done, these first and second Christmas trees look pretty good. They bear at least a passing resemblance to the professionally decorated trees I see in fancy hotel lobbies or on Pinterest.

However, our Third Christmas Tree is another story.

This tree is not normal or even regular normal. For engineering reasons no one fully understands, it lists to one side, like an ocean liner with a crack in the hull. And there’s a dark patch where the lights no longer light-up. I compensate by adding extra lights, which then creates a sort of weird and uneven Glob of Illumination at the bottom.

And then we have the ornaments.

Most of the decorations on this tree were crafted by my children using pasta, Elmer’s Glue and their bare hands. You probably have ornaments like this on your own tree.

Years of Advent-related craft projects in Catholic school have given us innumerable nativity scenes created from macaroni and/or popsicle sticks with Baby Jesus represented by a cotton ball. We also have preschool ornaments reflecting our years in the prestigious Hedgehog and Bumblebee rooms.

This Third Christmas Tree also wears all the kitschy ornaments we buy in low-rent tourist traps while on vacation. A plastic statue of Liberty from a trip to New York. A garish sunset from our trip to the British Virgin Islands last summer.

If this were a Hallmark Christmas special, I’d say that because these ornaments are handcrafted with love, our Third Christmas Tree is the most beautiful tree in our house.

But this just isn’t true. Our Third Tree is really and truly tacky.

This tree is also a billboard for our many low-brow passions, from Star Wars to the Washington Commanders to lefse, a Norwegian-style tortilla my mother imports from Minnesota in her suitcase each year.

Our Third Tree is kind of like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, if the Charlie Brown tree were artificial, crooked, and decked out in Mandalorian themed décor. Meanwhile, the First Tree in the family room with the fake turtle doves from Michaels looks beautiful.

And I think this says something about the world we live in right now.

My beautiful First and Second Christmas Trees are sort of like social media. Nice to look at but lacking in heart. Lacking in history. It’s not legit, as my kids like to say.

These beautiful trees hold no memories. They show no progress. But when I look at a decidedly inelegant ornament made from pipe cleaners and pasta, I see the passage of time.

My macaroni painters have become kind, interesting, funny people. These highly imperfect ornaments demonstrate how my kids have grown. The tacky tourist bulbs remind me where we’ve been and what we’ve done.

A few months ago, I got tired of all the perfect images on Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook. Every time I scrolled through social media, I felt sort of sticky and unsatisfied, like I’d just eaten a whole spool of cotton candy. So I quit. I stopped scrolling and I stopped posting.

After about a month offline, I found myself noticing real things. Like the perfect circle of sky framed by the tree branches in my back yard. The way a huge flock of little birds will swoop and dive like a living cloud before landing on the grass. The way the leaves flutter like confetti as they fall from the trees. Fox prints through the snow in my back yard.

These real things aren’t perfect. I’m terrified that fox is going to run off with my tiny little dog. But being away from social media makes it easier to muster gratitude for the real life I have, instead of the perfect life I don’t.

My Third Tree reminds me that real life is paint and macaroni, patched together to create something imperfect with a history behind it and a story ahead, filled with meaning, even when it doesn’t look the way we think it should.

I’m getting back on social media in January. I wish I could just write this newsletter, which I love so much, and write my books and call it a day, but I can’t. Being on social media is part of my job as an author. So I’ll climb back on the horse. But maybe after taking a break from Pinterest and Instagram I’ll feel less pressure to make everything look perfect and give myself permission to slap a little glitter on a popsicle stick and call it an ornament.

So I won’t wish you a perfect holiday season. Instead I wish you a holiday season where you embrace the overcooked turkey, the family pictures where children refuse to smile at the camera, the dry tree that prematurely drops all its needles, and the dog that eats wrapping paper.

Because this is real. And real beats perfect every time.

Happy Holidays with all my love,

Christine

Christine Gunderson blogs about writing, parenting, and the ups and downs of the writing life.

She is the author of FRIENDS WITH SECRETS.