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.

Share on Social Networks

Have you ever wondered how the social media world works for so-called “influencers”? I find it comical, so I thought I’d share with you. I frequently get offers such as what I’m about to describe. And if I’m getting such offers — as a relative nobody in the online world — you can only imagine what people with huge audiences are offered. It starts with an email appealing to my ego: “We came across your online presence and we LOVE your style. We’d love to have you as one of our Brand Ambassadors. To celebrate our new [Brand Name] collection, we want to give you a FREE Watch so you can post a picture of you wearing it and drive more exposure to our brand.” Did you hear that? They love me. They want me to be seen wearing their cheap $59 watch so other people will think, “If this amazing influencer wears that, surely I should buy one.” They even offer me commissions on the watches sold from people clicking from my site. So the next time you see some alleged “influencer” touting something online or on social media, remember that this is what it’s probably all about. It’s laughable.

Modern culture is going insane. The latest evidence comes from the effort to redefine children’s author Dr. Seuss as a racist whose books should be banned. Why? Because a few images in those books don’t meet modern political standards. The drawing you see here is one of those “dangerously racist images,” and it comes from the Dr. Seuss classic, “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.” The book catalogs all the wild diversity seen by a child on one street, including the offending drawing of a Chinese boy. What’s racist about it? Apparently, it was racist to show the boy eating rice, wearing a funny hat, using chopsticks and (worst of all) having eyes represented by a slit. (The bearded man near him has dots for eyes, but that’s apparently OK.) In other words, the stereotypes are considered racist today. (Oddly, the culture warriors who fret over such things are never concerned if a white southerner is depicted as ignorant trash living in a trailer. Some stereotypes are great, especially if the left hates those people anyway.) Theodore Geisel — the name of the real-life Dr. Seuss — was a product of his time and nobody at that time would have seen any of this as racist. Using stereotypes and exaggerations is how artists depict differences in simple ways. You can argue that it’s better to achieve the end result in a different way, but it’s insane to pretend that everybody from the past should have his work erased because it doesn’t match the preferences of modern leftists. Unfortunately, the company that publishes Dr. Seuss books has caved to the insane people — and six of his popular works will no longer be published. The world has simply gone insane.

Tyler Barnes will never be a basketball star. He probably peaked as a star high school player in Louisville, Ky. But for the last four years, he’s been a walk-on player for the University of Alabama. He’s a chemical engineering major with lots of academic honors who rides the bench because he loves being part of a team. He sometimes gets into games with a minute or two to go, but only if Alabama has a big lead. This Saturday, it was senior day for Alabama basketball, so it was his last chance to play in Coleman Coliseum. Alabama Coach Nate Oats says that one of the team starter’s came to him an hour before the game started — and fellow senior Alex Reese asked Oats if Barnes could start in his place for this one game. Even though the game was huge for Alabama, which is ranked No. 6 in the country and trying to wrap up an SEC title, Oats agreed. Barnes started and played the first three minutes, grabbing what was only the fourth rebound of his career and missing his only shot. Barnes has a great future as an engineer, but you’ll never again hear from him as a basketball player. For three shining minutes Saturday, though, he was a starter for a top-10 college basketball team — and his parents were in the stands from Kentucky to see it. There’s a lot of ugliness in college basketball right now, but this story makes me happy.

It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

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