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It Was Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
Just not in my apartment
Three days before Christmas, I finally got nudged into putting up something resembling decorations in my one-bedroom apartment. I laid a green table runner decorated with snowmen, reindeer and stars on my coffee table. And I hung up perhaps the world’s tiniest stocking, with a Santa finger puppet poking out the top. I think I finally reached the nadir of “don’t care” regarding the holiday.
It wasn’t always this way.
When I was a kid, my parents bought a live tree each year. We decorated it with tinsel and ornaments, and those strings of lights that each year seemed to have one fewer that lit up anymore, as if the energy expended tangling themselves together sucked the energy out of them.
Dad hung lights under the eaves. Mom taped up all the Christmas cards we got on the paneling in the dining room. We baked cookies by the dozen, from my favorite, peanut butter with Hershey kisses, to snowballs and something with rum in it.
In the ’70s, my folks switched to an artificial tree. Unlike the daring neighbors, who went with silver, we got the green one.
At some point in my childhood, we shifted from opening gifts Christmas morning to Christmas Eve. Mom told me stories about Dad’s frantic efforts putting…
