Shannon Proudfoot is a reporter in The Globe and Mail’s Ottawa bureau.
Here is what happens when you decorate a Christmas tree with young children.
The smallest ones will hang every ornament they can grab on the same eye-level branch within easy reach of their chubby little paws. Bigger kids will become obsessed with decking a couple of hard-to-reach boughs that have been carefully selected for the likelihood that they will lead to destruction of property and/or personal maiming.
Either way, you end up with a few branches creaking under 17 pieces of festive twinkle, while the rest of the tree goes luridly naked.
With kids (I have three, all under the age of 9), you also end up with a beautifully motley collection of decorations: little painted handprints; concoctions of beads, pipe cleaners and construction paper; and random store-bought decorations someone became obsessed with on a dash through Canadian Tire. (A mauve felt narwhal? Sure, throw it in the cart.)
This is all genuinely wonderful, the exact stuff of which family memories are made. And if done correctly, by giving kids absolutely free rein, it means that your Christmas tree will look like a leaf blower and three drunk forest animals with a hoarding problem decorated for you.
Now, in contrast, here is what makes me deeply, selfishly happy when it comes to decorating a Christmas tree myself.
It should be trimmed with a selection of artfully curated ornaments, distributed with balance that is at once perfect and casual. Ideally, it will look like Martha Stewart performed some sort of vaguely threatening quasi-religious ritual to achieve the result.
I once heard the term “appropriate confidence,” which is giving proper due to your talents, and I instantly loved the concept. My appropriate confidence is that I am very good at decorating, and it brings me significant joy to do it well.
You see the problem here, right?
It would be ungenerous and wrong to deny my kids their sloppily magical, mismatched, sticky-fingered Christmas tree decorating. But it would be just as sad and resentment-making not to indulge my own joy.
And so – taking inspiration from my mother before me – I have My Tree.
It stands in the living room, the least-used (read: cleanest and quietest) room in our house. At some point after the glorious chaos of decorating our family Christmas tree as a group, I put up my tree, leisurely and all alone in the dark of night, accompanied by some soft Christmas music and a nice, toasty stout. The ornaments get distributed according to my exacting standards, no one small is offended or frustrated by my art direction, and I can sit on the couch afterward and admire my unsettlingly perfect creation.
My tree is always decorated in navy, white and silver, with ornaments collected over the years on an enchanted forest theme. The crucial thing about having a tree of one’s own is that it gets to be exactly what you want, with no compromising. This, too, I learned from my mom.
When I was a kid, we had these unholy Christmas lights on circular strings, which required her to spend one entire evening every year wrestling them around the prickly nylon tree like a festive straitjacket. After that torment, she’d help as my sister and I decorated with just as much charm, and just as little design sense, as my own kids now employ.
But then, one year, my mom managed to procure her own tree, which stood in the corner of our freshly renovated kitchen, decked in the rustic “country” ornaments she loved at the time: bead garlands, wooden stockings and sleds, and sprays of baby’s breath.
I don’t remember when we replaced the demonic circular Christmas lights on the family tree with linear ones, thereby improving my mom’s yuletide quality of life by roughly 1,000 per cent. But I do know that we never helped decorate that kitchen tree, and we never questioned that fact. Everything else my mom did, in December and otherwise, was for us – and that’s still true. But long before I really understood why, I knew that tree had to be just for her.
At a certain point in adulthood, you go from being a consumer of Christmas – gobbling up the day in joyful oblivion in your jammies while eating your weight in stocking chocolates – to a maker of Christmas. When you are a maker, the to-do lists are longer, the stakes are higher and the obligatory-to-voluntary ratio of holiday labour is different. The entire orientation of the day shifts, like a camera on a dolly revolving 180 degrees to reveal that you are no longer the star of your own show – now, it’s all about your kids, guests or anyone for whom you’re trying to make magic.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a big change that undeniably leaves less room for you – particularly if you are a parent. But it’s also true that it is impossible to build joy – to joyfully build joy, which is really the only way to do it – for the people around you if you don’t find a way to reserve some for yourself.
Now that the holiday isn’t about me any more, my design-magazine fever dream of a tree is the Christmas delight I keep for myself. However you celebrate, whoever is the star of your show, whatever it is that makes your soul giddy, try to find a way to hold onto a bit of it for yourself – in the dark of night, with a nice, toasty stout.
Shannon Proudfoot