Sometimes, I just look out the window and remember, makes me smile. When I was a child growing up in rural Maine, we often cut our own Christmas tree, the kids did, out in the big woods. As kids, we shuffled about among oaks, maples, hemlocks, spruces, and pines until we found something. Sensibly, we did not grab oaks or maples, but something gloriously random.
Today, well beyond Christmas trees, things often seem prepackaged. This is not all bad, just different. Much is non-random, often pre-set, pre-cut, plastically frosted, and one-size-fits-all or tailored to exact preferences we did not know we even had, our choices made by others.
Even when we order things online, we get a drop-down list, options pre-thought for us, in that way also limited, little room for randomness, less for original thought, and zero that you will – for example – pull some unshapely, knobby branches, sticky pinecones, together for a wreath.
Picking out Christmas trees, we often walk among well-pruned varieties, all symmetrical. Wreaths are perfectly circular, collected without any deer sign or mud to kick off your boots, no burs on your pants, and no random trapdoors over well-disguised frozen streams. We had those delights in youth.
More broadly, we get glitter-encrusted and singing cards, aisles filled with dancing Christmas animals, pink, purple, red, blue, and rainbow trees, and lots of stuff that jumps, spins, and flashes.
In my youth, kids made Christmas cards out of construction paper, then cut the same colored paper into strips, turning strips into loops, taping them to each other until we had a long, colorful chain to ring the tree with, lots of randomness, only made more random – by our homemade gifts.
We would spend time sawing wood, bending coat hangers, assembling popsicle sticks, nailing, gluing, sanding, then cheerfully applying polyurethane or paint, often making a random mess, perhaps clipping, snipping, designing and finalizing our priceless wonders, gently putting under the tree – all perfectly imperfect.
Come dinnertime, everyone poured into the house, smells good enough to eat, no microwave or instant anything, instead piles of imperfect culinary perfection, one aunt a master of making hard candy (covered in confectioner’s sugar), another a whiz at making “Needhams” – a Maine specialty, coconut in chocolate, as well as toasted delights, while my mother baked apple and peach pies, peaches one of my sisters threw down to me on the ground, both of us waving away yellowjackets.
Turkey was carved with care, potatoes mashed by hand, gravy doted on – the way French families worry over soufflés. We had lumps in the potatoes, cranberries in our sauce, cream hand whipped, mixed with vanilla over desserts. Sometimes, music was just us singing, or the kids on instruments.
All this is to say, while I love the pre-packaged things when time is short, the perfectly pruned trees, magically symmetrical wreaths, cards that sing, and characters that jump, jiggle, wiggle, and jingle, there is something to be said for imperfection, for a handmade, homemade, let it go, let it snow, keep it simple sort of Christmas. Sometimes, I just look out the window and remember, makes me smile.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
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