The Grinch Tree

We haul the box that held our Christmas tree for the last 10 months of its hibernation up the basement stairs and slit the tape holding it closed with a butter knife.

My kids unpack one section of pre-lit bunched artificial greenery after another, and we plug each section into the one below until we reach the top. She’s a lopsided cone now, standing in the corner by the living room window. When we straighten her out and plug her in to the outlet on the wall, she looks like she’s been woken from a very long nap, complete with bedhead and a plastic candy cane ornament we missed when we put her away in January.

No stringing lights! No impossible tangles! No standing back and scrutinizing the gaps, rearranging the wires, scrambling for extension cords, wondering if we need to add just one more set of lights!

I am a walking advertisement for this pre-lit tree.

With the living room cast in a warm white glow, we add our mishmash of ornaments including an orange felt wiseman from my mother’s childhood home, a starfish from our honeymoon on Prince Edward Island, a row of jellybean houses from Newfoundland, and a Pinterest-inspired cinnamon stick nativity.

Now it feels like Christmas.

***

“There’s a light on this tree that won’t light on one side,” I remark a few days later when I notice a few bulbs in one section of the tree are dark. I’m not sure that I quote the Grinch exactly, but I’m close.

Not more than a week later, that entire section–a horizontal stripe covering a third of the tree–goes dark. We replace a few bulbs with the spare ones from the little bag at the bottom of the box and the lights work again for a bit. But, it’s not long before the same section dims again.

A few days after that, a second section is out.

So we try everything. Replacing the obviously burnt out bulbs again. The Amazon tool that promises to repair Christmas lights with the click of a button. Another Amazon order that delivers 100 replacement bulbs we stick into the sockets of every light in the burnt out sets one-by-one.

But everything we do only seems to make it worse.

Defeated, we scrounge an extension cord out of a different box in the basement, and we dig out the old strings of Christmas lights. We drape one around the tree to cover the broken sections, run the cord to the nearest outlet, and plug in the new (old) lights.

After these few weeks of unrelenting Christmas light drama, it seems the Grinch couldn’t have been lying about the broken light on Cindy Lou’s tree. Breaking lights just seems to be something Christmas trees do.

***

When we take down the tree in January, my husband and I spend an evening unclipping every one of our tree's lights and tossing them in the trash. Fingers aching, all that’s left is an empty artificial tree.

Next year, I will sigh when we haul the tree box upstairs and I remember the Christmas of broken lights. I will be annoyed that we couldn’t fix this tree. I will overthink which lights we need to buy now, and I will fight to untangle them when we open the box, but there will still be light.

I will think of the Grinch, poised on the edge of the hearth, ready to stuff up the tree, and consider how wholeness–like Christmas–doesn’t come from a store (or an Amazon order of replacement bulbs). Perhaps the secret to changing a two-sizes-too-small heart is about a little bit more.

Maybe the broken things–an empty Whoville, Mary’s tenuous family relationships, the accommodations in Bethlehem, the political climate under Herod, the body of the baby in the manger himself–are star players in making us whole.