As Christmas starts getting closer,
I miss the joy I felt for family trees

By David McElroy · December 9, 2018

The little girl’s name is Lucy. I’ve spoken to her father a few times and he’s a kind man who seems very close to his daughter. I rarely see the mother, but they were all three there tonight.

They all looked happy.

The family live around the corner from me and my Lucy and I pass their home on our walks every night. (When the little girl first met Lucy last summer and discovered they had the same name, she was delighted. Their shared name gave her the courage to pet Lucy and giggle over how soft she is.)

Tonight, the curtains were wide open in one of their front windows. As they decorated their bright and colorful Christmas tree in a darkened room, they had opened the curtains to share the beauty of what they were making with the world.

They had no idea that my Lucy and I were in the shadows outside watching them, but I stood there in the frigid wind and rain sprinkles for a long minute — as my heart took in the warmth and joy of a family at Christmas, something which I haven’t experienced for myself in so many years.

I haven’t had a Christmas tree for years — partly because of the cats and partly because it seems like a waste of time to decorate one just for myself — but I still feel a pang of longing for the joy of a tree as Christmas gets closer each year.

When I was a child, one of the highlights of my year was putting up the tree and decorating it. I helped my mother from an early age — when she still lived with us — but by the time I was about 10, my sisters and I had taken over the tree by ourselves.

In my younger years, I remember my father being involved in setting the tree in the stand, but I hated his involvement, because he would always find something to get angry about. By the time I got old enough to supervise putting the tree in the stand myself — shaving off part of the trunk or finding a way to make it balance — I don’t think he ever again had anything to do with the tree.

I don’t know how this division of labor evolved, but I soon was designing the lighting portion of the tree and then my sisters would take over for the rest of the decorations. I spent many happy hours with wires strung out in the living room and nearby halls as I untangled strings and then replaced bulbs that had burned out.

I had a meticulous system for the lights. I didn’t want there to be a discernible pattern, so I had a complicated system for my lights. The first layer of lights circled the tree horizontally, from bottom to top. Then there was a layer of lights that were vertical as much as possible. And then there would be one strand that criss-crossed diagonally.

When I was young, all the lights were the old-fashioned kind that stayed on all the time, but at some point, I switched to the twinkling kind that blink on and off in random sequences. I always insisted on using as many colors as possible. I didn’t want a trendy mono-colored tree. I wanted something that looked like what you might expect to find in a Normal Rockwell painting.

It’s ridiculous to care so much about decorating a tree and to care so much about the specifics. (I still want a Scotch pine, for instance, even though the Fraser firs seem more popular today.) It’s ridiculous to bring a dead tree inside the house and deal with all the falling needles for a few weeks.

But I miss it very much.

I think about it a little bit every year — as I see other people’s trees — but I don’t think I’ve missed it as intensely as I did tonight when I watched little Lucy helping her parents decorate their tree.

Families develop certain patterns and rhythms — for good or for bad. I’ve experienced both the good and the bad of such patterns. And decorating a tree together is one of the good things. In my mind, it’s not just a tree. It’s not just interior decorating.

It’s a shared bit of history which a family creates together each year — and I desperately miss making those memories. I need my own wife and children so we can create our own family memories — with warmth and caring and joy and love.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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