That Christmas feeling ~ December 6, 1990

David Heiller

Christmas is a season, all right, and it’s here now. It wasn’t here last week, but it’s here now. Don’t ask me to define the difference that a few days can make. Maybe flipping the calendar over to “December” made the difference. It shouldn’t, but on Saturday, December 1, I felt THAT FEELING for the first time in 11 months, the feeling that the Christmas season had arrived.

It comes with a certain slant to the daylight, the soft light of short days with the sun hanging low in the south, and six inches of fresh snow underfoot.

Malika, Noah, Joey and
Queen Ida Christmas tree hunting.

It’s a light that’s great for walks down back roads with a seven-year-old boy who has deer-antler fever and thinks maybe we’ll find a set that some hunter forgot. It’s a great excuse for a hike, and we do find a lot of deer tracks in the snow. We find a glassy patch of ice in the culvert and watch bugs crawling through the water just a few inches from our noses. We spot a bald eagle flying south, its white head and tail feathers lit up by the setting sun that has left us in shadow. We spot the full moon already hang­ing in the eastern sky, ready to shine so bright you can read a book outside.

But alas, we find no antlers. The closest we get is a ragged deer pelt which the dogs have dragged home from the neighbor’s. Noah decides he wants to bring it to his first grade Show And Tell, but I say no, so we compromise with a little piece that he puts in a plastic bag.

We also get that Christmas feeling when we cut our Christmas tree. We usually get one from the land south of the house. But this year we drove to a friend’s, Deane Hillbrand, who had a patch of white spruce he wanted to thin.

We walked carefully through the grove for 10 minutes, rejecting this one as too flat and that one as too scrawny. Actually they all looked awful pretty with snow on their branches in the bright afternoon sun.

Then Cindy and Deane started to ooh and ahh at the same time. They’d found a beautiful 12-footer, nice shape, no bare spots or holes. Deane and I cut it down with my cross-cut saw that is used only once a year, for this purpose.

Noah entertains little Grace
under the Christmas tree.

Then we filled our cups with marshmallows and hot chocolate from a Thermos and toasted the new tree. We drank to the tree, to Christmas, and to our friend Deane, whom we thanked heartily. Dean said he was only too glad that we could use a tree that was doomed to be thinned out. That’s the kind of guy he is.

Now the tree is up in our living room, its light sparkling in the eyes of our children, who helped decorate it Sunday night and Monday morning and Monday night. Kids like to stretch these good times out.

Noah even asked as we climbed upstairs to bed, “Can we take the decorations down tomorrow?”

I asked why. “So we can put them up again, because it was so fun,” he said with a silly grin.

Our Christmas trees always put new meaning to the words, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” You wouldn’t play 20 bucks for our tree. But we wouldn’t trade it for five times that, because you’d have to trade the hot chocolate and sunny afternoons and friends like Deane, and they are priceless, just like Christmas.

Now if we could only find a set of deer antlers for Noah. Maybe Rudolph will bring some.