We heard the snow before we could feel it. A light, icy mist more than snowfall, a slight, rhythmic tapping against the orange-brown needles on the ground-like the drummer's brushes sweeping, scarcely touching, the worn skin of his drum.
"It's snowing," Marie said, pulling on the sleeve of my flannel coat. She leaned against the car, tapping a knuckle on its window, smiling at Erica, moving sleepily in her seat, staring out as large drops formed on the glass.
I nodded. Like children, we anticipated the first storm each winter. It felt like the best of luck when the snow began to fall on a Saturday morning in December, as we were choosing our Christmas tree from the small lot, crowded with pine wreaths and a forest of evergreens.
"Should we get the spruce?" I asked her.
"Which was that?"
I pointed toward the back corner of the lot. "Almost the right height, a little too thin, no major gaps."
"Will it smell nice?" she asked.
The salesman nodded. "Like Christmas."
"All right," Marie said. "Let's take it."
The salesman waved toward his assistant, a large red-faced teenager. The boy went to retrieve our spruce, and I pulled four ten-dollar bills from the pocket of my jeans. Together, the two men lifted the tree onto the roof of our car, running a thin cord through the front windows to strap it down.
I smiled at my wife. "Ready to decorate?" I asked.
"Let's do it," she said.
When I was young, it was impossible to anticipate Christmas without remembering my father's brother, Uncle Raymond. Ray lived in the valley north of town: the back of his small home pushed hard against deep woods, its side yard dropped suddenly to overlook Palmer's Creek. Living a little too close to town to be considered a hillbilly, Uncle Ray was still too far in the sticks to be thought of as anything but redneck. And he cultivated that image with an ironic pleasure. He drove a large, well-used pickup, complete with an empty shotgun rack, and Confederate flag bumpersticker, only half scraped off.
Every December, one or two Saturdays before Christmas, my father and I took a long drive to Ray's house. My father's car, a Datsun, was small-too small, he said, to haul trees. So, once a year, we made this trip to borrow Uncle Ray's pickup. When we walked into his home, Ray would look up, apparently surprised, then toss my father the keys that lay on the table between his coffee cup and newspaper.
"Here you go, John," he said. Turning and winking at me, he added, "Be careful, all right?"
I remember with painful clarity my father's discomfort each year when he sat behind the wheel of his brother's truck. He never looked smaller than he did during those first few moments of settling into this much larger vehicle. His hands finally began to move, awkwardly, as he started the truck and slowly backed it onto the road.
There must have been two hundred Christmas tree farms within an hour's drive from our home-or so it seemed to me. Every year, we found our way to a new, unfamiliar stand of pines, an unfamiliar grey-haired tree farmer and another red-faced assistant waiting to cut the trees.
If we happened to pass the tree farm we had visited the year before, my father would glance at its entrance, shaking his head. "Their trees don't last," he would say. "I wouldn't give that thief two dollars for one of his half-dead stumps."
The problem of keeping a dead evergreen fresh was the persistent thorn in the side of my father's Christmas. Every year, he would ask a different tree salesman, with fraternal seriousness, "Now, what do you recommend to keep this fresh?"
And every year, he received a different answer, a new ritual, which he would rush home to enact with desperate faithfulness. One year, he mixed the tree's water with flat ginger ale; the next year, he carefully dissolved two aspirin tablets in the water, precisely at six o'clock each morning.
Our trees lasted admirably through Christmas, heroically through New Year's and into the following week. In truth, none of us could ever detect a problem with any of the trees my father tended, but on the morning after he had dragged the tree to the curb, he would stand in our living room, sweeping up brown needles with an old broom, slowly, sadly shaking his head again.
My father bought trees that were easily managed, no taller than he stood, trim enough to fit through the narrow doorways of our modern home. Like his father, though, and like my mother's father, I have always favored Christmas trees that are more impressive than practical: eight foot tall, with rich branches that spread, like my grandmother's soft arms, far into the living room.
Wherever we had lived in Pennsylvania, in a series of small towns surrounded by easy farmland and old growth forest, Marie and I had bought our trees from old, potbellied neighbors, and the tough, friendly high school football players who worked weekends on their tree farms. They led us through the rows of spruce and Douglas fir, carrying a large saw and an extended yardstick, taller than any of us-they sold their trees by the foot.
Most of the trees, of course, had been tagged in October or even September. By the time we bought ours, in mid-December, there was scarcely a tree over six feet tall, without conspicuous holes, that remained unclaimed. And yet, without fail, the tree farmer or his assistant would manage to find us the one remaining ideal tree-not quite seven feet perhaps, but a perfect fit for our living room, and the small gap between its branches would hide against the bare wall.
What did it matter if the farmer's hand-made yardstick measured my wife at six and a half feet tall?
Kneeling down, the assistant would ask, "How far down do you want it cut?" And I would lean over, studying the base of the tree, trying to remember the approximate size of our tree stand, finally pointing to a spot about half an inch above the callused thumb of the sawyer.
He would cut through the trunk quickly, expertly, before carrying our perfect tree to our car, so we could bring it back home, decorating it from cardboard boxes dragged from the back of an upstairs closet. Over each ornament, we would fuss, remembering where we had found it, the year we had first placed it on another perfect Christmas tree.
What did the many brown needles that shook loose on the ground when we lifted the tree onto the car's roof, and again on the blue carpet when we twisted the tree into its stand, matter, after all?
Our first winter in Maryland, living just outside Washington and so far (we thought) from farm and forest, we bought our tree from a stand set up in front of a Catholic high school, across the street and two blocks away. We walked over in the early evening, just before six o'clock, but the shrouded sky was already dark. We dodged through the heavy traffic, unhappy commuters struggling toward home, that had backed up along the highway in front of our apartment building.
It had been raining that morning, and the school's lawn, already trampled by a steady procession of customers and trucks, had become a slick, muddy field. Marie's boots slid over the damp grass, and I held her once at the shoulders as she seemed about to fall. Around us, three or four tired salesmen led other customers, a dozen or so, mostly shopping alone, through the maze of Christmas trees.
The trees were already cut, propped with wire against a series of wooden posts. Behind us, between the stand and the school, lay a large stack of additional trees, wrapped tightly within plastic netting, carefully labeled.
"Can I help you?" A salesman, who might have been the high school football coach or a corporate accountant, had walked up behind us as we stood looking at the assortment of trees.
"Are all of these for sale?" I asked.
He looked puzzled. "Sure," he said. He waved one arm. "All of them. What are you looking for?"
"We're not sure," my wife said.
"We have Scotch pine over there." He pointed. "Douglas fir. Spruce out front." He hesitated, pointing tentatively toward one edge of the small field. "Should still be a few blue spruces left, too. Take a look around, give me a holler when you're ready."
"All right," I answered.
He nodded toward the side of the parking lot, where an assortment of tree trimmings and other scraps lay in a large pile. "Even have a few Charlie Brown trees if you're interested."
We both smiled as he walked away toward a new customer.
The trees were not tagged here. New trees were trucked in every morning, and most of them were sold by the end of the day. If not, they were gone by the following noon. There were no long yardsticks, no pricing by the foot. All of the trees were pre-priced, according to variety and approximate size, and marked on large orange labels tied to their trunks.
We chose a tall spruce, appealing and graceful. The salesman untied the tree from its post, carried it to the edge of the parking lot, accepted my money. "Where's your truck, sir?" he asked.
"No truck," I said.
"We live just over there," Marie told him. "We'll just carry it."
"All right," he hesitated, laughed. "You have a nice Christmas now."
At home, my wife made hot chocolate, heating the water in our microwave, and together we decorated our new tree, listening to old albums of Phil Spector and Motown Christmas songs, laughing and flirting, letting our chocolate grow cold.
That night, it snowed, the first snowfall of the year-a heavy, wet snow that crusted over parked cars and open roads. My wife woke me in the middle of the night, dragged me from our bed, pressed a hot cup of coffee into my hands. We stood outside, beneath the apartment building's shallow balcony, watching the whiteness mask the night sky, filling the bone-fingered limbs of grey birch trees.
In the morning, we stood by our living room window, absorbing the faint smell of a sparsely decorated tree, watching a Southern family, who lived on the floor above us, as they tried to dig their car from the ice and snow. A small child sat on the sidewalk, dumping moist handfuls into a bright yellow beach bucket. His father used a white plastic spatula to hack and scrape at the ice on his windshield. When he broke off a large chunk of crusty snow, he held it up in front of his chest, grinning as his wife recorded the scene with her camera.
After my father and I had selected our tree, and it had been lifted into the bed of Raymond's pickup, we drove it home, past Uncle Ray's house. My parents would set the tree in the front corner of the living room, my father carefully adjusting the heavy, metal tree stand and filling it with the doctored water that could not keep our tree fresh enough.
In the evening, my father would wrap the string of dull blinking lights from bottom to top; my mother bent the uppermost limb to slide on a cracked, smiling angel. Then we would decorate the tree with an assortment of familiar ornaments: large blue and red balls, clear frosted icicles, wooden elves and miniature toys. Together, we covered the tree with a light layer of silver tinsel, hung strand by strand on each branch.
But in the afternoon, before the tree could be decorated, we would have to drive Uncle Raymond's pickup back into the valley. My father nodded awkwardly at the neighbors who always seemed to be watching from their porches. In town, he grumbled at stop signs and red lights, cursing bad drivers, something he never did in his small Datsun.
Though we only stopped long enough to pick up his keys in the morning, during the afternoon we might spend two or three hours at Raymond's. Sitting at the dining room's rough wooden table, my father and his brother drank coffee (I could get a soda from the refrigerator if I wanted.), and Raymond would smoke his Camels. Sometimes, he would light one of the large cigars that filled his home with warm smoke.
On those afternoons, my father spoke more, and more freely, than I had ever heard. I could ask all of the questions that would go unanswered on other days. But mostly I chose only to listen, as two brothers-closer than I could realize-shared their well-worn stories: about the chicken farm where they had grown up, about college and the army and first girlfriends, about hitchhiking across country, to Mexico, and ending up-somehow-in Alaska.
After they had each finished a second cup of coffee, Uncle Ray would lead us into the back room of his house, where a large window faced a receding mountain of trees. He would have already set up and decorated his Christmas tree in that room. The tree was never taller than I was, but it was set up on a small table so that the gold star on top almost scraped the ceiling. Decorated in silver, red, and white, the tree was illuminated by a string of tiny, clear lights, almost invisible.
Raymond would bring out a pitcher of eggnog, and pour tall glasses for my father and himself, a small one for me. "Don't get drunk now," he would say, winking again.
We would stand in the back room, in front of the picture window, as a light snow might have started to fall upon the forest, gazing silently at the small, glimmering Christmas tree, sipping the cold eggnog that felt warm in my throat and stomach. Those afternoons, those brief silent moments, felt more like Christmas than anything else I have known.
During the long drive home, when the sky had already started to darken, my father and I would talk in low voices. He might pick up and continue a story that had been started at Raymond's table. When we neared town, we would wonder what my mother had made for supper, and begin to talk finally about decorating the tree we had selected together.
Later in the evening, I would search through cardboard boxes filled with decorations, looking for the tiny, fragile ornaments that reminded me of the tree in Uncle Ray's back room.
My wife and I never waited until after dinner to decorate our tree, never waited to let its limbs settle into place. Instead, we would set the tree up quickly, and begin to decorate immediately, enthusiastically.
By the time we had returned home that Saturday, the light, icy mist had turned into a considerable snowstorm. The roads were slick, the sky a twisting cloud of fine white dust. In the driveway, my wife unfastened our daughter from her car seat, and carried her into the house. I pulled on a pair of work gloves to unfasten the tree from the car roof. By the time I was dragging it into our living room, two inches of snow lay on the ground.
Erica, having waited patiently in the car while we selected the tree, sat calmly on the floor while we decorated it. When the ornaments had been hung, Marie asked, "Do you think we have enough tinsel?" She pulled two boxes, left from the previous year, from the bottom of the box of decorations.
"Sure," I answered. "That'll be plenty."
"It's a big tree."
"It's gorgeous. It doesn't need a lot of tinsel." I walked around the front of the tree, watching each bright globe reflecting every light in its reach. "It's almost a shame to cover any of this with tinsel," I said.
Marie threw a small fistful of tinsel onto one branch of the tree and laughed. I grabbed it, straightening the strands, spreading them out over several branches. Taking just one or two strands at a time, we covered the entire tree with a light coating of silver, like our first winter snowfall. The tinsel added a bright finish to our tree that the dark green of its needles, and each gaudier color of the ornaments, resisted. Erica waved her arms with pleasure.
"Do you really think it's enough tinsel?" my wife asked. She stepped back slightly, studying the tree.
"It's beautiful."
"We could pick up more in the morning," she suggested.
"It's perfect," I said, turning from the tree.
Two things happened between that Saturday afternoon and Christmas Day. Temperatures along the East Coast turned April warm, melting snow everywhere, leaving the grass a brilliant washed green, and my Uncle Raymond died at the home in California where he had been living for the past ten years.
I flew to Los Angeles the week before Christmas, renting a car to drive north to his home, a long way from Pennsylvania's forests, but not far from the Tehachapi Mountains. I met my parents in front of Ray's house, wrapping my arms around them, wondering at how grey, how frail, we all suddenly seemed.
On a warm morning, with cool sweat gathering on my face and forearms, I served as a pallbearer, standing beside my father, who walked on his toes through the cemetery, determined to keep one hand at least on the dark coffin. Beside the grave, we bowed our heads, tears and sweat falling together on the moist clay while a strange minister murmured and hummed. I felt my father's hand reach out, lightly grasping the sleeve of my coat.
I spent three days helping my father, the executor of his brother's will, pack and clean Raymond's small, neat home. We scarcely spoke the entire time I was with him, but it hardly seemed necessary. When I left, we were both tired.
Christmas Eve, late in the afternoon, I returned to Maryland. Marie and Erica met me at the airport, and we drove home quietly, through a warm drizzle. I spent the rest of the day on a chair in our living room, holding Erica, describing California for Marie. At nine o'clock, she brought me a ham sandwich, took Erica upstairs and turned in.
I waited downstairs for another hour before I followed her. Then I lay awake, sweating beneath an old afghan, too tired to interpret the stream of sudden images that flung themselves through my limping heart.
Late that night, unable to sleep, I stepped out of bed, pulling the blankets close to my wife's throat when she stirred. I walked back down the steps, slowly, and sat in the darkness, watching our neighbor's outdoor lights shine on the small patch of sidewalk I saw through the front window.
Our home was three blocks from an all-night convenience store. It was after two o'clock when I slipped outside, and the streets were empty. Only the bright Christmas decorations, the pale plastic snowmen in front yards and the faded wooden cutouts of Santa Claus and Rudolph posed awkwardly on rooftops, shared the evening, the morning, with me. I studied each as though it were foreign, a tiny marvel I had never before witnessed.
In the store, I poured the last of a pot of thick, dark coffee into a large paper cup. Near the cash register, a small metal rack held all that remained of the Christmas merchandise. I picked through it, finding a card for Marie, two chocolate Santas, some tinsel.
"A little last minute Christmas shopping?" the clerk asked, with a smile. "These were going to be half-price in the morning, but I can let you have them for that now, I guess."
"Thanks," I said.
He rang up the candy, the tinsel and the card, forgot my coffee, rang that up, then dropped my change behind the counter.
"Merry Christmas!" he called out as I was leaving.
Pushing the door open with my elbow, I turned and nodded. "Merry Christmas," I said.
The night was cold, and I had forgotten my flannel coat, grabbing instead the light grey windbreaker I wear on warmer afternoons. The wind cut under my flesh, but the warmth of the stiff paper cup spread up through my arm, and I passed the cup from one hand to the other. I walked quickly.
The living room was still dark when I returned. I turned on one small, dim lamp, then plugged in the tree lights. I sat down in a deep easy chair, drank my warm coffee slowly, and stared at the flashing patterns on our tree, spotlighting first one, then another, cluster of ornaments.
I thought once I had heard a rustling upstairs, a few steps on the floorboards of the hallway, but when I waited, listening attentively, I could hear nothing. When I finished my coffee, I rose, stretching my arms, and reached into the plastic bag I had been handed at the store.
One after the other, I opened three, four, five boxes of silver tinsel, dangling the strands, with the thoroughness of an insomniac, from each dark limb of the tree, like the thickening layers of white, sugary frosting on a steadily shrinking cake.