A Little Fruitcake Read online

  Arm in arm with my mother, leaning homeward, it didn’t seem such a failed Christmas after all. There was still plenty of time for me to spread the gospel of shoestring gift giving in the years ahead. We had miles to go before any of us slept. And new socks to keep our feet warm for the journey.

  9

  Tree Envy

  Blame it on the Daughters of the American Revolution, but I had a wicked case of tree envy.

  I had always loved our Christmas tree, its varietypack bulbs making it glow like a carnival ride, while a hodgepodge of ornaments testified to the haphazard evolution of my family’s aesthetics. The red Grampy and Grammy mice held places of honor as they had since the 1950s and were joined by 1960s-era plastic diamonds filled with frosted pipe cleaner “trees,” cornhusk angels (part of the colonial craze from the country’s bicentennial in 1976), and several adorable clothespin reindeer (from the White Elephant Sale at church).

  At twelve, I was too old just to lie on the floor and gaze up at the tree in dreamy adoration as I had many holidays in a row. But I still looked forward to getting the tree up every year, which marked the official beginning of the Christmas season (as opposed to the unofficial beginning, when the LaVerdiere’s specialty goods aisle swapped out its plastic pumpkins for plastic snowmen). Just one year before, Grammy had agreed to let me help out in a task that had always been hers alone: decorating the tree. It was surprising that she welcomed my participation because the truth is that we were not exactly the most harmonious of teams. Grammy and I could fight about anything, even when we were in basic agreement.

  The previous Christmas, our first collaboration on the tree, things had started out smoothly enough. I figured Grammy knew what she was doing, so I followed her lead. Everything stayed peaceable until we got to the candy canes. She had bought a bag of loose redand-white canes, which she hung directly on the tree because she considered them ornaments. I, however, saw them as both decoration and snack and complained that an unwrapped candy cane would come into contact with the sticky pitch of a fir bough, rendering it not just gross but inedible. I pointed out that there were individually wrapped candy canes at the drugstore that she could hang on the tree instead—far more sanitary and thus better suited to consumption.

  She promptly informed me that if I wanted to go buy those candy canes, I was welcome to; otherwise, she was hanging up the ones from the bag she’d already opened, and I could like it or lump it. She was pretty convinced that her young grandson was not going to waste his meager earnings to win this argument, and she was right. Her canes went up, and I made a pouty show of not eating any; my resolve lasted for an entire day before I broke down and took one off the tree to suck on, ignoring both the piney aftertaste and Grammy’s triumphant amusement at my weak will.

  When it came time to decorate for the second year, she might have expected that I would be similarly compliant. But Grammy had not seen what I had: the stunning masterpiece of holiday wonder that graced the very large living room in the home of one of the local Daughters of the American Revolution. The women of the DAR sponsored essay contests, held charity events, and planted flags on the oldest gravestones in town. Grammy knew one of these white-haired matrons and had arranged for my brother and me to sing at her functions several times over the previous years. I’d been summoned to her house that winter to receive, as a thank you, a keepsake wallet housing the newly minted Susan B. Anthony dollar coins. Though I thanked DAR Lady politely, I wasn’t impressed by the coins, which looked like quarters with an unhappy woman on them. I reserved my real enthusiasm for the tree.

  In an enormous parlor, a thickly symmetrical cone of tree perfection sloped upward from the floor to within an inch or two of the high ceiling. At home, our fir not only never approached the ceiling but rarely reached six feet. This was because, at 5'8", my fourteen-year-old brother was the tallest resident of our house by a good three inches. Grammy, just over five feet, was shortest, and she had no interest in climbing a ladder to hang decorations. The result was that even our nicest tree was just slightly taller than we were, and only a hobbit would’ve had trouble crowning it with a plastic angel.

  Already impressed by the stature of DAR Lady’s tree, I was further wowed by the precision of its ornamentation. The ornaments, including real glass ones, were all discreet in size and placed with a scrupulous eye for balance. It was like a grid that mapped out holiday flawlessness; if there was a small, shiny orb in the top left section of the tree, a similar ball appeared in the lower right, and so on and so forth in three dimensions until the ornaments were as organically integrated into the whole as the limbs.

  Then there was the matter of tinsel. We were definitely tinsel people and used the stuff liberally, without any special subtlety. But DAR Lady showed me a whole new way of thinking about it. It seemed, impossibly, as if her tinsel strands had been individually placed for maximum shimmering potential. There were no handfuls, no clusters, just thousands of ethereal foil ribbons placed as particularly as the ornaments. The tree seemed an unbroken sheet of silver that rippled softly with any movement of air. How on earth had she pulled it off?

  My hostess was proud of her handiwork. “I hang every piece of tinsel one strand at a time. It takes forever, but I do think it glorifies the tree. Don’t you?” I was in awe of her devotion. I thought of how my family blindly tossed clumps of tinsel at our little tree, and I felt ashamed, suddenly sure that we were insulting the poor fir whose life had been ended solely for our merriment.

  The more I inspected this Apex of Treedom, the more negative comparisons I made to our tree at home. For one thing, there wasn’t a single strand of garland on her tree, but we were as heavy-handed with garland as we were with tinsel. We used skinny burgundy garland, fat blue-green garland, and a few lengths of ratty gold garland, recycled from many Christmases past. The strands crisscrossed each other until they ran out, with the gold garland not quite making it halfway up the tree. No such gaudy trappings marred the DAR Lady’s creation.

  The kicker was her lights. They were all white. I had never imagined such a thing. Our tree was festooned with hot-to-the-touch colored bulbs the size of thumbs. Some of the older ones appeared to have their colors painted on, while the more recent ones were translucent; this combination of clear and opaque bulbs was a likable optical illusion, where some branches appeared closer or further away than they actually were. The vast majority of our bulbs came in straight-ahead shades of blue, red, green, yellow, and orange, though one in every six was milk white. I had previously seen this colorless minority as the worst of the lot: boring, no-personality bulbs that interrupted the rainbow splendor of the rest of the tree. But I had never seen white lights quite like the ones on DAR Lady’s tree. Here were translucent miniature bulbs in the shape of candle tips, tiny pinpoints twinkling among fir boughs like countless stars in an evergreen sky. This was sophistication! This was glamour! This was a big fight with Grammy waiting to happen.

  Having learned the lesson of the candy canes the year before, I armed myself in advance this time. On a recent outing to LaVerdiere’s, I had found two strings of white lights that I could afford and a fresh box of tinsel, sure that ours, which we reused every year, would be a wrinkled mess that would compromise my vision of perfection. I said nothing of my purchases until the Sunday afternoon Grampy made his annual trip to the tree farm run by the local chief of police, then returned with a fine balsam fir, which he hauled into the living room and set up in our dented metal tree stand.

  As Grammy opened the cardboard chests in which our Christmas ornaments were stored, I put a few holiday LPs on the record player to set the mood. I kept my back to her, fiddling with the arm of the record player as I said I had some new ideas for the tree. Grammy was good, really good, at arguments, so she simply didn’t respond; she waited me out till I had to turn around and look her in the eye to explain my big vision. We both knew her silence for the warning it was.

  I produced my strings of white lights and said I thought
they were actually prettier than all the colored bulbs. I ventured that having now seen the DAR Lady’s classy decorations, I was worried that maybe our bright bulbs came off as a little tacky. Grammy asked what made me so sure that the DAR Lady qualified as classy, and before I could answer that, she asked me if I knew that “tacky” was an insult. I switched gears, saying I also thought the white lights, which burned cool, might be safer. She chewed this one over for a minute, and I raced ahead, asking rhetorically whether it might not just be time for something new in general. If we didn’t like it, we could always switch back next year. I said this to sound reasonable but didn’t expect such a thing to happen, as I knew that one view of my majestically tasteful handiwork would win everyone over for good.

  This was about the time Mom spoke up. Mom usually stayed out of any fray involving Grammy and me, and I hadn’t even been aware that she was listening to our exchange. But she loved Christmas, too, and had also, unbeknownst to me, been thinking of a change. To my horror, she produced a LaVerdiere’s bag of her own containing a new set of lights. They were small, like mine, but colored like Grammy’s, with a novel feature: they blinked. As she took the competing strand from the bag, she pointed out that her lights could be made to blink in alternating sections or all at once.

  I was flummoxed enough to think that she had gone out and gotten new lights, and then it occurred to me that we had probably gotten them on the same excursion without my even noticing. Had she seen me in the Christmas decoration aisle and been inspired? Was she trying to trump me? I looked to Grammy to see how she was taking this not-quite tag team revolt. She had not even paused from unwinding lengths of old painted bulbs, despite the array of new options. She addressed my mother, but her message was meant to be global.

  “You know your father likes these. You want to put on anything else, be my guest, but these are going on first.”

  Mom had no problem with that, so before I knew it, the tree was strung with both fat opaque bulbs in all the old colors and tiny see-through lights in a new palette that included pink and violet. I should have just called it quits right there, seeing as the tree already looked at war with itself, but I was stubborn and decided that at the very least, I could make the tree classier by adding the little clear bulbs I held in my hand. Let the other lights adorn the tree like so much costume jewelry; mine would be the equivalent of a string of pearls.

  The next half-hour was an exercise in head butting. Mom had wisely left the room once her lights were up, leaving me to badger Grammy about which ornament went where. If she hung two satin-thread bulbs on the end of the same branch, I’d yelp that she was making things too “clumpy.” If she hung all the plastic bells on the same side of the tree, I decried the clear imbalance. I began wordlessly moving the ornaments nearly as quickly as she hung them, which only increased her annoyance.

  “Don’t you have anything better to do than irritate me?” she snapped.

  No, I thought to myself, I did not.

  The boiling point was the tinsel. When I said I had fresh tinsel, Grammy looked at me as if she was seeing me for the first time.

  “What on earth has got into you?” she asked me. “You think the tinsel is wrinkled? Tinsel doesn’t go bad!”

  I tried to paint a clearer picture of DAR Lady’s strand-by-strand method, but Grammy had had enough. Throwing up her hands, she barked, “Do any old foolishness you want. It’s none of my affair.”

  With that, she left me to my own devices, which was a clear victory for me, though it didn’t feel very festive to have sent my grandmother stomping out of the room. I knew the results had to be perfect to have made the drama worth it.

  An hour and a half later, I loathed tinsel with my whole heart. After only a few minutes I had realized that my game plan was a kind of madness: the individual placement of all five hundred “icicles.” Yet once I understood the tedium of the task, I didn’t dare stop, for the contrast between the painstakingly tinseled section and the rest of the tree would be naked. Not only would this be unappealing to the eye, but it would be perfectly obvious to Grammy that I had given up on a task she had scorned to begin with. My arms were trembling by the time I laid the last slip of tinsel on a branch near the bottom. My only source of consolation was that, as I wasn’t planning to add garland, the tree really was finished.

  Typically, we would have all gathered to light the tree as soon as it was dark. But just as we came together in the living room, we were startled by what sounded like a small explosion of some kind beneath our feet. I jumped; my brother said, “Holy moly,” while Mom put a hand on her chest as if to still her heart. Grammy had just opened her mouth to venture a guess about the noise when the next explosion went off, followed by a third and then a fourth. She turned to Grampy with one of her darkest looks and jabbed a finger in his face.

  “This is your fault!”

  Grammy flew out of the living room and threw open the door to the cellar, disappearing from sight before anyone but Grampy had a clue what was going on. The longest wall of the earthen cellar beneath our house contained rows of canned pears, peaches, jams, strawberry-rhubarb sauce, pickled beets, mincemeat, and more. Grammy had been grousing that she never had room for all her canning, and so Grampy had set up an additional rickety wooden shelf, which would have been fine except for its location next to the fur- nace. Grammy doubted the wisdom of this idea, worried that overheating might cause ingredients to ferment or even combust, but Grampy told her she was just being a worrywart, like always.

  Now, four quarts of applesauce had done just what she feared, heating so much that due to the pressure inside, the Mason jars finally burst their seals, sending the lids flying into the air like so many Wallendas. No one liked to be proven wrong by Grammy, who was not a bit shy about pointing out her correctness, but Grampy liked it least of all, having suffered this fate many a time in fifty-three years. He didn’t exactly hurry down the stairs behind her to see the damage.

  From the top step, I peered down to see what havoc exploding jars could wreak. It wasn’t pretty: wet chunks of apple pressed cobwebs into earthen walls, and soupy liquid softened the dark soil floor. It was appleswamp now.

  By the time the mess was cleaned up and Grampy had been thoroughly chastised, we all needed a little Christmas cheer. Ignacio did the honors of plugging the tree in, and then, well, we all just stood there a moment. Grammy chewed the inside of her lip, deciding how much to say, and Mom hazarded a tentative, “It’s different.” Grampy said what he always said, which was, “Well, good enough.” It seemed as if everyone was intuitively (and uncharacteristically) trying to spare my feelings, but I just kept quiet.

  I hated my tree.

  It wasn’t the fact that there were three kinds of lights on the tree. It wasn’t that things weren’t balanced enough—indeed, each ornament looked as if it had been marshaled into place like a soldier on parade. I had even achieved the same unified shimmer effect as the DAR Lady, so I couldn’t blame my repulsion on failed tinsel application. No, the problem was that it didn’t look like our tree at all.

  This tree, the product of so much effort, was too even, too balanced. It looked absurd in our homey living room, where the entirely mismatched furniture was unified only by a host of hand-crocheted afghans. The absence of garland meant the tinsel took center stage, and it was so precisely applied that it appeared freakish. Any hint of playfulness and spontaneity had been replaced by stiff uniformity. It wasn’t at all inviting.

  The only thing reminiscent of Christmases past was the inclusion of the mismatched colored lightbulbs. Those lights were all I had to convince myself that the tree was not a complete failure—but then the blinking began. By accident or design, the blink setting had been left on the sectional option, which meant that first three feet of roping blinked on and off, followed by the next three feet, and so on, until the flashing got back around to where it had started—then started again. The living room pulsed nonstop in rainbow colors, lighting up and going dark like a sma
ll-town disco with only one special effect.

  I wasn’t the only one hating it. Despite having herself purchased the offending strands, Mom complained, “That gives me a headache something awful.”

  “Then stop it!” said Grammy sharply, still prickly about her newly apple-coated cellar walls. Grampy wasted no time in tinkering with the first bulb in the string, and the lights blinked their last, to everyone’s clear relief.

  I paused, then said the unimaginable in a rush, “Let’s do the whole thing over.”

  It was late in the day, and the tree would surely have kept, but no one argued. There was something about this specimen that just sat poorly with us all, and starting from scratch seemed the perfect solution.

  Grammy brought all our holiday tins into the room, and we denuded the tree between bites of divinity fudge and peppermint patties. Once we’d stripped it down to the now steady lights, we followed a merry random path in reassembling things. No one looked too closely to see where anyone else hung an ornament, and when it came time for tinsel, it fairly flew through the air as we tossed inelegant clumps at the branches. In the end, there was a general agreement that maybe the garland, at least, had outlasted its welcome, and it was returned to the cardboard box unstrung.

  We were giddy by the time we stopped, a good hour after Grampy had abandoned our efforts. He was already snoring when we admired our handiwork. I knew that the DAR Lady would have been appalled, but this wasn’t her house, and it wasn’t her tree. Ours listed ever so slightly from all the poking and prodding it had endured, but it was cheerfully bright, even gaudy, a model of joyous abandon. Finally, as the old song goes, it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

  10

  A Hard Candy Christmas