The Christmas tree

These round, glass ornaments are so old they no longer glisten and have lost their hooks.
To decorate this tree you have to place each fragile ball just right between branches so that it won’t tumble and fall.
Without their original dazzle and shine, these ornaments are obviously far from new,
Some red and green, others gold and blue, all of them now faded into a dimmer and less evocative hue.
The plastic tree’s limbs droop cartoonishly, like a feeble person carrying a stack of too many worn, wise, fragile books.
This Christmas tree has been put up and put down so many times and I wonder at its worn, weak, and frankly desperate looks.

I think, if I’m honest, that we are like that.
I think our Christmas tree is fitting.
You see fresh, tall, elegant, glittering trees in windows.
A triumphant symbol of the peculiar glory of a baby delivering heaven’s most powerful blow.
The triumph of our tree is simply that it still stands.
Age and memory provide it with their own special sort of glow.
Like us broken and poor and yet somehow still irrepressibly here for this season of miracles and joy.
Somehow still here to greet the birth of the little savior boy.

Somehow our tree is still capable of glowing hard, if not bright, long into the black winter night.
Even if it requires jiggling the wires just so, just left, and then sometimes again a little to the right.
It still possesses the power to be for us a moving and memorable sight,
a bright menagerie of flashing green and yellow, orange and pink, before everything blinks into an ocean of white.
I suppose we, too, are still capable of giving the world light.

Beneath the weary, wobbly branches of the tree are a handful of neatly wrapped gifts.
Not many at all, really, but enough of them.
Boxes holding not expensive and dreamy things but things from the heart.
By now we’ve learned to do without the kinds of gifts that make your heart race,
But I hope it’s still true that an honest gift is still something that will light up one’s face,
creating memories which the caprice of time will not so easily erase,
giving us something beautiful and lasting to help transcend the persistent shackles of time and space.

So this Christmas morning we will as always gather by that tree.
We will sit for so long that one hour will become three.
We will smile more easily and take note of the gifts that come free,
of the love that ever more fills the gaping space between hopelessness and me.