Christmas before Thanksgiving

When I was a kid, my dad grew Christmas trees. I'm not really sure why he and his boyhood friend down the road began growing and selling them. Perhaps it was to make a few extra bucks from an otherwise untapped niche market. Maybe it was to show us kids how small businesses worked. (Lesson learned: use child labor.) Maybe it was just so they had something to do in the winter, or maybe it was simply because they enjoyed seeing the happiness on people's faces when they came to pick out their Christmas tree. They'd bring the whole family, sometimes even the dog, who'd run around lifting a leg on trees of his own choice. Then tree was cut, usually by my dad or the patriarch of the tree-choosing family. Sometimes Mom and the kids tried their hands at sawing the trunk while lying down in the snow wielding a curved blade.

When I was a little kid, it was nice to have a tree farm. Dad did all the real work. If someone came out to get a tree, he would go out with them to cut it. If it were too cold for me, I could stay in the house and drink hot cocoa. It was no big deal; Dad had everything under control. But as I grew older, and Dad realized that I should have more responsibility in my life beyond saving Princess Toadstool from the evil Bowser, he left a lot of the tree work to me. I was the one out there trimming in the summer, sometimes with company, sometimes alone. I mowed around the trees. In the fall, I painted them (industry secret revealed!), and when people came out in the snow to get their white or Scotch pines in the winter, I cut them and tied them to the roofs of their cars. And while it was nice to have that responsibility, I was still just a spiteful teenager. I didn't care about the tree. I didn't think about what it meant to the family that had just bought it. I never tried to imagine what it might look like inside their houses with lights and ornaments and a star and presents underneath. It was just a six foot pine, worth X dollars, checks payable to my dad. So for part of my teenage years, I resented the fact that people would come out to my house and use my time for their purposes, especially if they came on the day after Thanksgiving.

I didn't like the fact that the Thanksgiving holiday wasn't even over and people were already full-on Christmas junkies. They'd have a cold turkey sandwich ("I think this is starting to turn," they'd say) and come over to get their Christmas trees before the dirt on Thanksgiving's casket had even settled. (Yes, I did just make the metaphor of Thanksgiving being a corpse. I apologize for the morbidity.) It angered me that Thanksgiving was cast aside, and I didn't like it that people started decorating for Christmas so early.

But I came to realize that that's just how it is. Christmas starts on the Friday following Thanksgiving. I'd have to just live with it.

And now, Christmas has begun to encroach on November even more. I've been seeing commercials on television for weeks about what to buy this holiday season for that special someone. (Remember, a diamond lasts forever and it's not cliche to put a giant red ribbon on a new silver Lexus, park it in the driveway, and have your wife unwrap a small box with a key inside before going to the window to see the gift parked in the freshly fallen snow. Just once in one of those commercials I'd like to see a giant crow fly overhead and drop its own gift on the windshield. Just once.)

Because of this trend, I decided a long time ago that I wouldn't have a Christmas tree in my house before Thanksgiving. Ever. I didn't want to cheapen Thanksgiving by beginning Christmas too early.

Yesterday, however, Amy wanted to start putting up decorations. She wants to get a tree soon, too, and we don't have any time on Friday or Saturday or Sunday. If we don't have any time this weekend, she's afraid that we won't ever find time, so she wants to go on Wednesday and get the tree. I really, really don't want to, but I don't want her to be unhappy either, so yesterday I made a compromise. We started some non-tree decorating. We strung garland around the apartment. We took down some other decorations and put up some Christmas ones. We have lights on the deck. We have three nativity sets up.* We have red and gold candles and dishes with snowmen. We listened to Christmas music while we did all of it. And despite the fact that I didn't really want to put up all of those decorations yet, I had fun doing it.

Amy and I are already engaged, and we're living together (SIN!), so it's clear that at some point in the future we are going to officially be a family, but it wasn't until yesterday that it actually felt like we already are a family. As we decorated, we danced to the Christmas carols. We gave each other a hand when it was needed. We talked about what decorations should go where. We laughed. We talked about the future. We waltzed down the hallway.

We decorated for Christmas before Thanksgiving, and it was amazing.

And while I still don't want to put up the tree before Friday, I can begin to see why so many people came so early to get their trees. It allowed them another opportunity to come together with their families. Christmas is of course a time for us to give of ourselves, our time, and, all too often, our money, but I think it goes well beyond that. I think that Christmas is not just a time for giving, but of spending time together, of coming together. Sure, the figures in the nativity scene are bringing gifts for Baby Jesus, but they are also communing with one another in a way that goes beyond the simple giving and receiving of gifts. They're there to witness the coming together of a new family, not just consisting of Mary, Jesus, and Joseph, but also of every human whom Jesus was sent to save.

So if decorating early allows us be together, then there's really no reason for me to resist it so much. I don't think celebrating Christmas early is a slap in the face to Thanksgiving. I think that maybe it's just a different form of thanksgiving.


* I told Amy that I'm going to swap the characters of each nativity around to the other nativities. Which Baby Jesus goes where? That should be a fun game.