I did not decorate our house for Christmas this year, nor did I put up any decorations last year, except for an old plastic wreath I placed on the front door. The year 2017 marked the last time that I hung up a string of Christmas lights on the overhang of our porch, which I had been doing for over a quarter of a century. Mother was in the hospital for a few days in the middle of December. I turned the lights on before the ambulance brought her home. I don’t know if she was aware enough to appreciate the lights. She had only a couple of weeks left to live.

Our tradition of decorating for Christmas goes back to our apartment in Jersey City in the early 1950s. I remember my father dragging a small Christmas tree (the runt of the selection) across a vacant lot to our apartment. (Good luck finding a vacant lot in Jersey City nowadays.) He set the tree up on a corner table in the living room. Looking back, I would have to say that our Christmas at that time was a humble affair, because my parents had to pinch pennies to save for the house they would soon be building in rural New Jersey. But these were nonetheless happy days for all three of us.

When we moved into our newly completed house on Huyler Road we had room for a full-sized tree, which we displayed in front of the picture window. Every year for the next ten years my mother and I would decorate the tree, stringing lights over the branches, attaching ornaments, and hanging strands of silver tinsel. Incidentally, the burlap mat under the tree comes from Denmark. Mother sewed in the colored areas in 1956, and we placed the mat under all of our Christmas trees from then on.

We also had a full-sized tree in our next home in New Brunswick, where we lived for six years. One Christmas, our dog, Muff, crawled behind the tree and got tangled up in the electrical cord connected to the lights. The tree came crashing down to the floor. Muff was unhurt, but there was water on the carpet and a couple of broken ornaments. It was something of a disaster, however, it made for a memorable Christmas, which we would talk about for years to come. Subsequently, we put the tree up on a cobbler’s bench, where it would be out of Muff’s reach, and repositioned the electrical cord.

We scaled down on our Christmas trees after we moved to Pennsylvania, buying a small plastic tree that would fit on a small table. It had become too much trouble to clean up the fallen needles and dispose of a real tree, or to plant a burlapped tree in the backyard as we did once in New Brunswick.

Now that my mother is gone I can no longer bear to set up our little tree or to put up any decorations. It was something that we always did together. I looked at the poinsettias in the grocery store, but quickly decided not to buy one. So I’m continuing with the process of scaling down. Soon there will be nothing left of me and my Christmas memories but a smile, like the cheshire cat in Lewis Carrol’s Alice In Wonderland.