It was the tinsel that caught my eye. Amid the dirty snow and dull gray tones of winter, January offered little in the way of visual splendor. When my brother and I were playing outside shortly after the holiday season one year, we happened upon a neighbor’s tree that still had much of its sparkling tinsel tangled in its boughs. It fluttered and reflected the sunlight, an incongruous bit of glamour in a landscape of the downtrodden. We were so entranced, we carted it to our backyard, dragging it through the snow all the way to the area behind the pool pump house, away from disapproving parental eyes.
We dug (as best as we could) a little hole in the snowy ground and managed to prop it up. It transformed the space in such spectacular fashion, and we were so tickled at the novelty of extending Christmas in this secret stretch of forest, that we promptly hit the neighborhood to find another. By the time the afternoon ended, we’d assembled four or five former Christmas trees in the space behind the pump house, on the edge of a forest that was mostly just populated by bare deciduous trees. We’d created our own little evergreen grove, and in my fantastical imagination I envisioned them taking root and prospering here, affording more hiding spaces, and providing a holiday nook that would retain its beauty year-round. (I didn’t know much about gardening way back then; what little I did know indicated that my fantasies were rather far-fetched and too good to be true.)
The trees looked fine for a few days, and when covered with freshly-fallen snow they made a happy scene indeed. It was our very own winter wonderland, conjured from discarded Christmas trees and discarded dreams of sparkling tinsel. Winter would not have it for long, however. Rather, winter would be the only one to have it, as soon the evergreen needles dried and fell off. The branches went bare from the bottom up, their stems turning dry and prickly, the bright tan shade of death that betrayed desiccation. Our little evergreen forest was dying off as instantly as it had been created. We were mostly bored by it at that point anyway. It was more fun to roll the trees down the bank and see how far they would go into the wooded stretch.
I’d wanted the magic of Christmas to last just a little longer, and it had… but never quite long enough.
