I Bought A Christmas Tree

 "I bought a Christmas tree."

"Great," I answered, setting my book down on my lap as I watched Blake bring the douglas fir inside our house, wearing a smile that I could tell was something painted on.

I said nothing more than that one syllable word to Blake as the tree was brought through the door and placed in our living room. As of December 20th, we had been married for ten years. Kids? Non-existent. Before we married, we agreed on children. I found out later that Blake did not want kids and wanted to focus on "career goals" instead. Career goals, I later came to find out, meant going to work everyday to flirt with a different coworker weekly. Christmas was not cheery after about year six when I realized it wasn't ever going to be like I dreamt it would be one day: a snuggled couple watching their children hang on to that little bit of magic year-by-year, knowing it will one day fade, but hoping it isn't this year yet.

"Isn't it beautiful, Charlie?" Blake asked, trying to reach the top of the tree, but shortness prevailing. "I picked it up on the way home from work tonight. I figured we could use a little cheer."

I set my book on the coffee table in front of me, "Yes, honey, beautiful." I reply.

Although my Christmas spirit had been worn down at year six, it still sparked inside my coldened heart every so often. When I walked by a bakery and saw cookies in the window, or heard my mother talk about their Christmas plans in the Bahamas (we never could make it, of course, because Blake was a journalist and I was a highschool History teacher), and even when I happened to catch a whiff of pine. That night, the pine scent touched my nose and hypnotized my mind.

Maybe I was wrong about children — maybe they never fully lose the magic of Christmas inside their hearts. Our hearts just turn harder and bitter by the year, protecting ourselves from the outer world. I believed, that night, that there was still magic in my heart.

We forgot our careers. Our hopes (my hope) of children. Our (Blake's) flirtatious coworkers. Every marital issue that had come up in the last ten years was temporarily frozen with the enchantment of Christmas

........

Temporarily, though, right?

That night was thirty years ago, and goodness, has there been a lot of change since then.

Two months after that night, Blake came through the same door as that captivating douglas fir had also done. Blake stood in front of me, without even the mercy of a warning, and announced, "Pregnant."

That's all Blake said, and I couldn't even bring myself to speak. Blake took my dream, and gave it away to someone else.

Five months later, the divorce became final.

I'm reminiscing, now, because I'm observing my daughter and son-in-law as they help each other with the topper on the tree. They're filled with a Christmas-like magic, but they always have been filled with that magic.

I look down — my baby granddaughter sleeps soundly in my arms as my older grandson plays in the dusky yard with my baseball-glove-wearing son. I hear a call from the kitchen "Charlie?" And it's Emerson, looking at me with the giant turkey tucked into its eternal bed. "I need help."

A lightness washed over me. A feeling that was so familiar for the last twenty five years with Emerson — the feeling of my heart thawing a little more, letting tiny rays of magic escape into the outside.