I don’t know who loved it more – me and my sister or him. As for my mother, it took me years to realize why trimming the tree never mattered to her. The happiness she found was in seeing how much we enjoyed it, but for her a tree wasn’t what made the season bright. Over the last few years, my mother’s childhood friends started to gather on Facebook sharing photos and memories. Some she’d stayed in touch with, others she hadn’t spoken with in decades. More than once, old neighbors and friends, even a waitress from the long gone Colony coffee shop, have posted about my grandmother - remembering her, remembering the house and remembering the tree. I don’t keep a tree up all year, but I carry my grandmother’s message in my heart. I decorate in mid-December, thinking of her as I hang the needlepoint stockings she made and the ornaments she had engraved each year with my name. Peace, love and generosity should be present three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Long after I place those boxes of décor back in the garage.
They say everyone in Hollywood has a screenplay. When my grandmother passed away several years ago, amongst her papers I found the treatment for a sitcom she had written, called Everyday is Christmas. The story was familiar. Very familiar. It was about a woman living in a house in the Malibu Colony, “the meeting place for her kids’ friends and all their friends’ friends,” with a St. Bernard who “loves surfing, which leads to a lot of sand in the house” and a “Christmas tree is left up all year round… because ‘Every day is Christmas’ and every day is a new unopened package.”
Typed on carbon paper with notes in her distinctive writing, I held those pages, her words, in my hands. A gift greater than the biggest box under any Christmas tree. Any time of year.
alex asher sears
The Holiday Guide
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