The fall in itself was nothing special. It was more the terrible inevitability of it, toppling so sickeningly slowly. Four stricken faces. One unanimously anguished cry. Everything was ruined. We'd only got it that morning, see. Our tree. My in-laws were coming for dinner and I wanted everything just-so. That the halls should be decked with boughs of holly. Can't it wait, asked my husband an hour before their arrival, the tree still in the boot of my car, dessert unmade, me in my dressing gown. No, I said, it can't. So we lit the special Christmas candle, and put Bing Crosby's Christmas album on the stereo, and it was all utterly horrible.
The year before, in order that we not return from camping to a house stale with Christmas, I had shoved the decorations away willy-nilly in the attic. The attic I had promised myself I would sort before 2016 was done. Where are all the photos of us with the Smith & Caughey's Santa, asked my son. Where is the Santa I made out of a toilet roll at kindergarten, asked my daughter. Where are the other two bloody legs for the Christmas tree stand, yelled my husband. Be there in a jiffy, I called, rifling through camping equipment, ski gear, and seven years' of paperwork, desperately seeking anything remotely Yuletide-ish, sweating profusely, all the day's humidity trapped in that ceiling. I heaved anything I could lay my hands on down through the opening, and backed down the ladder as quickly as possible. But when I caught my knee on one of the rungs, it was so painful that for a moment I couldn't see. I took a deep breath. We would not stray from the plan. This is lovely, isn't it, I said, coming in to the living room where my children were engaged in a vicious war, and my husband lay sprawled beneath the tree. The effin' trunk's been cut crooked, he said. For a good half hour he cursed and grunted upon his bed of pine needles, eventually propping the tree precariously against the wall. This'll have to do, he said.
In a panic we threw decorations at our leaning tree, left, right, and centre and, just as I was thinking we might make it, seven minutes remaining to shower and prepare dessert, my daughter reached up to hang a last star in the upper branches, and the whole thing came crashing down.
Nothing in family life, I am embarrassingly belatedly coming to realise, ever goes quite as hoped-for. The next day, still raw, already silly season-ed out, we had an early Christmas with my side to attend. It had been my suggestion to hold it outdoors. But the day dawned all blustery and spitty, and no one was dressed warmly enough, and the gazebos threatened to blow away. Are you all right, I woefully asked my centenarian grandmother, who sat huddled under a picnic blanket. "Oh yes," she said, "isn't this wonderful, everyone here together, under these tall trees." And I looked up into the blue spaces caught between the leaves, and saw she was right.
That evening we relit the special Christmas candle and put Bing back on for take two. "It's perfect," saidmy small daughter when it was done, "and Dad didn't even have to have one of those wrestly fights with it." And I saw that at 8 she already quite possibly knows more than me.
