DECEMBER 7, 2024 – My Nilsson grandparents, who lived within easy walking distance of “Dinkytown” on the edge of the main campus of the University of Minnesota, never showed interest in decorating for Christmas. By the time I was in their lives, anyway, they’d dispensed with the whole business of buying a tree, decorating it with ornaments and tinsel and tying mistletoe over any of the doorways. They didn’t even bother hanging a wreath on the front of their house. The only way you knew that they knew it was Christmas was that at around noon on Christmas Day, they showed up at our house dressed in their finest clothes and carried inside a tin of homemade spritz cookies and large Dayton’s shopping bag stuffed with six of the most meticulously wrapped giftboxes the world had ever seen—since the previous Christmas.
This was all well and good—my grandparents coming to our house to celebrate Christmas and, of course, the shopping bag full of presents, except, I, who would have much preferred something “fun,” always received an article. Our grandmother had very high sartorial standards, and so everyone received the finest shirt, blouse, sweater, scarf, or hat and gloves. All of this was lost on me who wanted a battery-operated toy boat or car.
Frankly, I didn’t think my grandparents really understood the meaning of Christmas: that it was a time to bring a Christmas tree into the house and decorate it while you ate fresh-baked Christmas cookies. My grandmother got the cookie part—mostly, I figured, since cooking and baking were her main concerns in life.
Once in a while, however, she’d introduce a third interest: her childhood in Sweden. I remember her telling about Christmas on her family’s farm. Inside the large farmhouse where she and her seven siblings lived with their parents, her father would install a fine spruce from the forest that surrounded their farm. No one was allowed enter the room until Christmas Eve, when her father would light the candles that were clipped to the boughs (yes, candles on a fir tree!). Then the festivities began.
So, back in Sweden in the 1890s and into the early 1900s, at least, my grandmother knew full well how to celebrate Christmas.
My grandfather, who led a much more independent and hardscrabble childhood (his mother died shortly after he was born), never talked about Christmas past.
But now that I’m older and wiser . . . er, most specifically, now that I’m exactly as old as my grandparents were when I was in kindergarten, I now know why they decided to dispense with decorations.
Today was decoration day inside our household. Yesterday we’d pulled umpteen crates and boxes down from the attic over the garage and hauled them onto our back porch, which has always served as our Christmas decorating staging area. The containers hold enough Christmas tree ornaments, Santa and nutcracker collections, stars and angels, Christmas lights and doo-dads, and miscellaneous other decorations for hearth and home, to start a “World’s Biggest Second Hand Christmas Store.”
Missing, of course, was the live tree—the seven-foot balsam or Fraser fir we used to buy at the Falcon Heights Lions Xmas Tree Lot next to the rec center on the edge of the University of Minnesota experimental fields a five-minute drive from our backdoor. We’d tie it to the roof of my wife’s car and haul it home, where I’d cut a two-inch piece off the bottom of the trunk, attach the tree-stand holder, and pull the tree-with-stand gently inside to its dedicated place in front of the street-side window of the “Christmas room.” My wife would have the prepared the space for the tree’s arrival, and after what seemed like an eternity of adjustments—“It has to go a little toward the wall’; “Oops, now that’s too far”; “Okay to your left”; “More”; “More”; “Nope. You went too far”—I’d finally get the tree standing more or less straight, 360 degrees around.
Next, my wife would string on the lights. She never asked me to do this, and I never volunteered. Once the lights were the way they were supposed to be, my wife would oversee the ornament and tinsel hanging. Soon, as if Christmas magic had swept through the house, the handsome tree was fully trimmed and ready for show. Beth would then lay boughs over the mantel, lay strings of lights upon them, then set up a Christmas village or so on blankets of faux snow. I was always awed by her simple, tasteful flourishes that filled every room with Christmas cheer.
With the advent of Covid-19, much changed. For Christmas in 2020 we downsized from a floor-to-ceiling fir to a “top-of-the-trunk-to-ceiling” model. It worked perfectly. To make space for the “truncated tree,” Beth cleared the antique steamer trunk of the “coffee table books” on top. The new arrangement worked perfectly. It was half the trouble (at roughly half the cost) as before, yet from the street and sidewalk in front of our house, passers-by would have no reason to think we were cheating.
This new arrangement became permanent. I can now be old without being my grandparents. I can eat my Christmas cookies and have them too.[1] Of course, the secret ingredient is having our nine-year-old granddaughter around for the tree procurement and decorating.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1] If you’ll notice, most people say, “have my cake and eat it too,” but the reverse order is more precise. What the saying is supposed to convey is “having something both ways.” That is, eating your cake, yet having eaten it, being able to keep it.
