Dec 06 2005
It’s Christmas Time at the Suzy’s
I am feeling all festive this year. This is a bigger deal than you’d think, since it’s the first time I’ve felt like celebrating Christmas since Dad died, four years and four months ago. We always had such a wonderful time at Christmas. He and my stepmother would come every other year, and we’d rent a house right on the ocean in Bodega Bay. Often, it would be warm enough for a Christmas Eve picnic on the beach, and one of my very favorite photos of Dad was taken on New Year’s day at nearby Point Reyes, as he paddled in the ocean, loving the sun and the shore birds (the sanderlings were his favorites, and are mine as well: they’re like charming wind-up toys).
That can of GrinchBeGone must have really worked, because I have a tree! Naturally, it’s unnatural, being a vintage, silver and white number, originally from the long-gone, legendary Gimbels department store in New York. It may be even more vintage than I am, since the price tag reads $2.88!
I thought it would be a lot easier to set up than it was. I sort of imagined that you’d just open it up like an umbrella, but no. You have to put it together, and fluff out the branches. Then you have to find a tree stand to fit a trunk approximately the thickness of your average broom handle. I soon discovered that in the world of tree stands, you most certainly can be too thin. Nothing fit my tree’s svelte silhouette, so I ended up trapping it between bricks I found at the back of the building and covering them with cloth napkins I liberated from some first class travel some time ago. Who says crime (well, pilfering) doesn’t pay?
It’s also much harder to take a good picture of the tree than I had anticipated. It has three sets of twinkly lights that twinkle at all different times, so it’s never all lit up at the same time, and the photo was the best I could get. I love the twinkling, though.
As if that weren’t enough, I also have a wreath. This one is real Scotch pine and smells all Christmassy. You can tell I decorated it, since the ornaments are all haphazard. I think it looks pretty anyway.
