Last weekend John and I decorated for Christmas. We picked out our tree at a pre-cut farm (no choose-and-cut for us — we aren’t that ambitious!) and managed to keep our tempers reigned in while shopping in crowded stores for trimmings that were the appropriate size. While decorating, we reminisced about last year.

Last Christmas we were fresh out of college, the ink on our degrees still bleeding. We had no job and no options for one. Our savings and a not-even-part-time tutoring gig I picked up were the only things getting us by; the couple of students I worked with only occasionally showed up, so I only occasionally got paid. We lived in a quaint, beautiful one bedroom apartment with rooms so small we couldn’t fit a full-size couch or a normal table. I loved that place. It had stucco walls and hard wood floors and interesting neighbors. There was the young gentleman whose marijuana you could sometimes smell leaking through his door (and all the drug paraphernalia he left behind when one day he just skitched out of town) and the heavy-set elderly woman, a chain-smoking hoarder who thought the solution to her breathing problems was to habitually call an ambulance instead of trying a nicotine patch.

To fit a Christmas tree in that place, I ditched an end table that had multiple shelves holding pictures and knick-knacks. It wasn’t a huge sacrifice. The end table was a free gift that druggy-neighbor had offered us when we moved in. There were no hurt feelings, as by this time he was long-gone, both the rent and drug police tracking his whereabouts. Plus John hates knick-knacks, so he was happy to see the rather ugly thing go. We bought our tree off of some Catholic Sunday School kids selling them in their church parking lot. We asked for the smallest one they had; it was hard to find one that fit. We had forgot to bring cash and had to run to the bank. Then we had nothing but John’s little Honda Civic and no twine to transport the little fir back home. So John carried it.

I kid you not. He walked that little tree the four-to-five blocks to our place — even crossing a busy four-lane highway with no crosswalk. Then we placed it in the stand…and found out that our tree was crooked. Very crooked; its stem was bent at about a 30 degree angle, and we had simply been too green and too excited to remember to check for that. We made up for it every way we could think of since we didn’t have a saw; the repositioning helped, but in the end the tree was still slightly bent. (It’s a good thing people don’t decorate with candles anymore…) John jokes that our tree was a symbolic Tiny Tim who you could almost hear squeak out, “God bless us…everyone.” And of course, every single person who visited made comment about our tilting tree, which we had decorated with tiny red and silver bulbs I bought at a dollar store, but I was proud of it anyway.

This year we have a much bigger tree. We had to trim the top to fit the star beneath our 8-foot ceiling. Without a doubt it’s a prettier tree; and since we bought it about 20 miles from our home, John is very thankful that the only carrying he had to do was up our steps!

John and I are hosting Christmas with both our families this year. It’ll be a full house so we decided to exchange gifts with each other early. John normally works Sundays but by a stroke of luck, got next Sunday off due to some rescheduling issues. That means we will have an entire weekend together! We decided to do “our” Christmas then and had started to plan a lovely couple of days with presents and stockings…the whole bit, just moved up a couple weeks. We wrapped each other’s presents last night and stuffed the big boxes beneath the tree. Then we sat staring at them, shaking them, squeezing them…completely and utterly tempted.

“Hey,” John nodded slyly at me. “You wanna just open them tonight?”
“No!” I cried. “We can’t do that.”
“Why not?” he countered. “It’s not like we have children we’re teaching to be patient or anything.”
“But what about our own willpower?” I giggled. “We’re supposed to be adults!”

You guessed it — we opened our gifts anyway. Normally I like Christmas Eve to be fancy with fun food, a nice dress, soft music… This time, we’d already eaten a thrown-together meal of black beans and I was wearing plain clothes but…we did have a small glass of box wine from the back of the fridge and threw our last paper log in the fireplace. Some Michael Buble Christmas music on Youtube serenaded us and afterwards John ran up to the gas station to buy a chocolate bar.

We mocked ourselves — two impatient kids who opened their Christmas presents on December 3! But we also knew that this would be one of those memories when we will look back nostalgically and say “Remember that Christmas when we just couldn’t wait for the special weekend we had planned?” Like last year’s tree, I fully expect to remember this Christmas memory fondly.

What about you? What is the special “Remember that one Christmas” moment in your life? That time your family did something out-of-ordinary. That first year in college with your new-found friends. Please share….’tis the Season!