As Christmas gets closer, I miss the joy I felt for Christmas 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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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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