Great Big Tree

It always takes a full Saturday. We break for lunch and laundry, but from start to finish, putting up the big tree takes between six and eight hours. It depends on how fussy we are about stringing the lights and draping the beads—this year, the lights took about an hour, the beads about half, but getting the star in place and securing Bart the Bear in his perch brought us perilously close to losing our minds completely.

Okay, maybe that steamed eggnog for breakfast was stupid, but fatigue is definitely a factor. Once again, fitting the holidays into a hectic work life will be a challenge; no matter how early we begin, it’s always a mad dash to December 25 … or at least until we start our Christmas vacation.

Enough whining. Back to the point.

Ter and I have built a significant collection of cool ornaments over the years. It’s so significant that we often forget the ones most recently acquired until we pull them from their bubble wrap. Then eyes go wide and one of us will gasp, “I forgot about that!” before some frantic rearranging happens to make frontal space for the shiny new(ish) piece. I’m still unaccustomed to the typewriter Nic sent me two years ago, but I anticipate my talking Hoops and Yoyo from our last year at Rockland because it’s had time to set in my memory. I’d also forgotten the Lannister lion that Ter stuffed into my sock in 2014, and the jester stocking she bought the year before—you’d think that three trees would be enough to hold everything we have, but a Bean tree to handle all the trinkets from Nicole may be on the horizon. I realized with a pleasant start that she and I have been shipping things from coast to coast for almost twenty years, so it looks like this friendship is in it for the long haul.

Then there are the “WTF?” ornaments – Darth Vader and James T. Kirk, Captain Jack Sparrow and Daffy Duck, wizards and rock stars, unicorns and stilettos mix among church bells and sleigh bells and snowmen galore, you name it, the big tree has it. We’ve got winter solstice covered, too: stars and moons and polar bears, and the resident foodie’s fruit collection to represent the season’s bounty. Every branch tells a story from our history, collective and individual—the ornament Ter contributed to her third grade class tree is present, as is the circa-1967 ornament that I pinched from the Greig family tree when I left home. The big tree has it all, including its own guardian: Grizz, the bear who hibernates from January to November and stands guard throughout December.

He worried me a bit, yesterday, though. After welcoming him from his nap, I told him that Moon Pie is eager to see him again and, rather than being pleased, he looked bewildered. “Who is Moon Pie?” he asked.

My heart broke for the puffball, who was at that moment telling his buddies that he’d be hanging with the Grizz tonight. How could he not know Moon Pie????

Dismay rendered me speechless, so Ter took over and the gods be thanked for it. When she explained about the baby polar bear, the light went on. “Oh, the little white guy! Yeah, I know him!”

What a relief, but a larger question resulted from that exchange. We have names for every bear … but what do they call each other?