A Christmas Tree Made Me Cry: Pandemic Holidays Painful For Many

NORTH FORK, NY — Christmas trees have always held extraordinary meaning in my life. From the time I was a little girl growing up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the day the tree went up was almost sacred and deeply steeped in tradition.

Back then, we had an artificial tree. The day began with my mother and I trudging down to the basement and lugging the container in which the tree was packed up two flights of stairs. Once the branches were out, it was my job to organize them into piles, depending on the color of their tips — pink, green, white, orange, yellow.

As I organized, my mother always put holiday records on the Victrola, and we sang along, both off-key, both so happy. "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," the old favorites echo still in my memories. As we sang, my grandmother would set up in the kitchen with the ingredients needed to make krumkaker, Norwegian rolled cookies marked by delicate designs.

Every year as we worked to set up the tree, my mother would tell me the stories, share the memories wrapped up with each ornament like so much tissue paper. Those ornaments hang on my tree today.

My mother loved Christmas with a ferocity hard to capture in words. She'd start shopping on Jan. 1 for the next year and, while she didn't have a lot of money, she took such pride in making sure the tree was piled high with gifts every year. Piles and piles of gifts, wrapped up with love.

When she died, on one of the hottest, blazingly blue August days, her friends brought a tiny Christmas tree, fully decorated and with lights, to the funeral home. And on one of our last days together, my mother pointed to her closet, where there was a pile of wrapped gifts in August, ready for the Christmas she knew she wouldn't live to see.

In the years after, I did my best to instill that love of Christmas, that holiday sparkle in my mother's eyes in my own son's. And the centerpiece of our holiday was always our tree. All the ornaments from my own childhood along with the many handmade ornaments my son made in Pre-K, with those he'd picked out himself over so many years. Our tree has always been a masterpiece made up of memories.

Even when he moved to Los Angeles, we kept our traditions alive during his visits home or mine to California. No matter where we have been, there have been Christmas trees and special ornaments, bursting with meaning.

Except this year. This year when because of the pandemic, I won't be able to see my son on Christmas Day, or his birthday, so soon after.

I've been trying to be stoic about it. We'll Zoom and eat the holiday meal together across the miles, as we did on Thanksgiving. Santa (who lives forever in this mama's heart) will find his way to my son through the mail this year.

I held it all together until yesterday, when I made a trip to pick out a Christmas tree. And it was there, surrounded by happy families and fragrant, lush trees and the Department 56 villages that have been traditions for years, all the trappings of a holiday that make up a lifetime, that I literally fell apart.

Crying. Seriously ugly, loud crying. Sobbing so long and loud that I could barely see to drive home, without my tree. But I went back, and when I did, what came next reminded me why Christmas is really made up of magic and miracles.

My friends at the shop, and other friends who happened to come by while I was there, they saw my sadness. And they listened, and consoled, and shared their own stories of how hard this pandemic has been, on all of them. In their eyes, above their masks, I saw understanding, compassion, friendship. I saw love, in its purest form.

I heard stories from these amazing women about how we aren't meant to live this life in isolation, six feet apart, devoid of hugs and human contact — how we are, in our hearts, tribal creatures, meant to travel this road of life together. We are meant to be connected, through our hearts and stories and yes, our hugs.

And oh, how we miss it all.

But the caring, the genuine power of the human spirit, it rises up. It carries us through this dark time. Masks securely on, those women and I connected, we shared, we laughed. They helped me find my Christmas joy.

And somehow, the heavy blanket of gray sadness lifted, in those moments of caring and compassion. Somehow, my beautiful Christmas tree safely tucked in my SUV, I was able to forge my way forward into the holiday season with the realization that yes, things are different. Yes, we are sad, some carrying grief so heavy over losses they've suffered this year that the holidays have lost all sparkle. But together, we will get through this, masked and strong. No pandemic can stop the love, the friendship, the bonds that span miles.

Hanging my new cardinal ornament on my tree, I remembered the words of a friend who told me that cardinals symbolize joy and are a reminder that the ones we love, they're always with us — I realized something so important.

During this pandemic, it's okay, not to be okay. And it's okay to bare those sometimes not-so-pretty truths to the ones we trust. It's okay to say that our lives aren't always Facebook and Insta-shiny, not all neatly wrapped up in glittery bows before towering Christmas trees. Sometimes, life is hard, and lonely, and sad. Sometimes, we just need a good cry. But if we let them, our friends will be there, to talk us through the storm, to remind us of cardinals and tomorrow.

Somehow, the true meaning of Christmas, it shines through. And this Christmas, when I'm Zooming with my son, I'll carry the phone over to my tree, and show him the cardinal, and share its story, just as my mother did with me for a lifetime of ornaments and Christmases. The stories, they live on. The love is forever. And maybe that's the meaning of Christmas magic.