that tree

December 23, 2001

Today's Reading
The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature edited by Victor H. Mair, Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes by Peter Matthiessen

This Year's Reading
2001 Book List

Photos:

That Tree

Yikes! It is in the living room. Well, at least it's not blocking the driveway anymore.

My family has contracted a weird form of amnesia that causes everybody except Andrea to forget that I am a vegetarian.

The ornaments won't all fit on the tree. And Andrea shows potential as a mechanical engineer, observing that one of the traditional garlands is so heavy it exceeds the load bearing capacity of the tree. This is good as she has renounced her desire to become a writer. Apparently she thinks writers have to have good penmanship.

That weird Santa that La Madre bought on sale several Christmases ago waves its lantern back and forth hypnotically. Is this Santa of the Old North Church lighting "one if by sea" to spread the alarm that the British are coming? Its eyes are all glazed over like it's drunk or high. We speculate that it is hypnotizing us into going to the North Pole to become elves. Thomas says he didn't see the gold ring with elvish script on the great dome nor did he see the poster, but he laughs at the painful truth of the brass rat ruling them all when I tell him. Well at least the future rulers of all are well fed if they live at the DKE house - he regularly makes La Madre's turkey tetrazini for them, not to mention good old shepherd's pie and his world famous lobster ravioli. Why am I thinking about food? Am I hungry? Is it possible to write food porn about tofu? I knew I should've bought Tofurkey the other night.

It's that Santa with the mesmerizing lantern messing with my head. Either that or that tree messing with my sense of reality not to mention symmetry and balance. There it goes falling over again. It leans against the wall looking disoriented as if it has fallen into an alternative plane of existence where the laws of gravity suddenly apply after all. Just make sure the wise men aren't at the manger yet and that they're either coming from the east (as in We Three Kings of Orient Are) or from the west (as in we've seen his star shining in the east - doesn't that mean they're coming from the west?) and no, I don't know how many nativities there are in this house really, Andrea. I just say there are ten thousand because that's the family tradition. Why don't you count them?

Oh won't somebody please tell the traditional story of breaking St. Joseph's head off while playing football in the house? And why don't we put the tree up the day after Thanksgiving like normal Americans? I always thought it was an Irish custom to put the tree up on Christmas Eve and take it down on Epiphany and now I find out it was only my Dad's custom. He made it up? So we're doing it a day early 'cause BiB has arrived and everybody can make it in time for the shrimp and grape leaves and Air France has misplaced BiB's luggage and that of thousands of other passengers. Free roaming luggage is milling around Charles DeGaulle Airport and we're sitting here trying to engineer the tree into staying upright under the load of ornaments amassed over fifty odd years by one very odd family.