It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, sometime around 1965. I walked into the living room to find our thick-haired, silver-gray cat, Scuffy, airborne, maybe 3 feet above the floor, legs forward, paws extended, claws out, crashing into our new, shimmering, silver aluminum Holiday tree.
Tabby, brown with black stripes and named cleverly by us to match her breed, followed Scuffy as his wing-cat, not quite as high as the flying, lead feline but with the same fervor, penetrating with force the pointed silver perimeter.
After her attack, ornaments shook, tinsel trembled, and the tree wobbled, teetered and pitched over onto the carpet with a shudder. I yelled at the cats, they scattered, and I surveyed the wreckage of bent limbs, scattered snowlike foil strips, and broken ornaments. My sisters, worried about how Dad might react when he came home from work, set out to straighten the thin, bent wiry branches, cleaned up the broken glass and swept away the “snow” before he arrived.
The poor tree never looked quite right again, but it served as our glimmering holiday conifer for a couple more seasons, with red and green tones from the color wheel drifting over a few weirdly angled arms.
Christmas: it arrives with expectations. The trees we set up wear and shape them.
In “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” T.S. Eliot wrote:
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectations of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance …
Eliot beautifully captures the wonder of a child upon seeing his or her first tree. But the reaction of our cats on their first encounter with this tantalizing, glittering tower of color and movement was to pounce.
And they did.
But we, the cats and people inhabiting this bungalow at 15th and Clarence in Berwyn, recovered. Wounded and mildly misshapen, the tree took its place amidst the broader array of symbols, rituals, music, prayers and practices that for us defined the Christmas season.
Despite the tree’s condition, the awaited morning on the 25th came off with the joy and wonder we had come to expect. We went to Mass at St. Mary’s, taking in the stirring solemnity of Jesus’ birth. We gathered and exchanged gifts with extended family. Mom — or maybe “Aunti” or maybe both — prepared an awesome dinner of ham, chicken or turkey. And for dessert there was Grandma’s lemon meringue pie.
A family’s yuletide culture builds over the years while it submerses the stories of individual trees under multiplying layers of memory.
Sixty years later, our trees now stand in front of a window looking out on Marion Street in Oak Park. We walked home with last year’s green fir from the lot on Chicago Avenue next to a pizza place. Outside our window, two living pines rise, one of them taller than our building. Colors coming from the street, some seasonal and others year-round, mix with the red, blue and green lights on our branches to remind us that Christmas takes place not only in a home, but in a community.
We won’t have to worry about cats, but we will have to monitor the expectant, small hands of grandkids as they probe our decorations. They’re attracted to ornaments, like the red and blue wooden airplane that will be hanging from its hook. They’re allowed to grab that one, but we’ll need to guard more warily, or situate on higher limbs, the more fragile, glass bulbs, especially those that have been with us a long time.
It’s early December once again, and expectations are building. In the silence surrounding the tree that will occupy our corner this year will reside memories of many lit and adorned trees from the past, including a trembling, bent silver one whose shape was sculpted in part by two crazed feline projectiles.