When I was little, my family always spent New Years at my grandparents’ house in Wisconsin. We celebrated our own second Christmas with them (actual Christmas was spent with the other grandparents in New York, but that’s a story for a different time). We looked at Christmas lights, opened presents, and spent time together as a family.
My grandma always had relatively elaborate Christmas decorations. The path to the front door was lined with LED lights, and the front yard was scattered with light-up reindeer, inflatable snowmen, a miniature sleigh, and more. Two human-sized nutcrackers guarded the front door.
Inside, in the corner of the living room, sat the huge, 8-foot Christmas tree that my grandma painstakingly decorated every year. The decorations were coordinated: mostly silver with a few red and green ornaments, wide silver ribbons, and a sparkly star at the top. The tree was amazing, which was why it sat in the center of the house, to be admired by anyone on the first floor. It was beautiful.
But my favorite part every year was decorating the other Christmas tree. The smaller 5-foot tree was always ready when we arrived. It sat tucked near the back of the house, inside the screened in porch, bare except for the box of ornaments and strings of lights sitting underneath.
Together my grandma and I, with occasional assistance from my brothers, decorated the tree.
We blasted Christmas music and danced around the porch. We talked for hours, catching up on absolutely everything that had happened in the months since we’d seen each other, and making plans for the rest of our week together. We took frequent breaks for cookies and hot chocolate. We ended up with fond memories and a tree strewn with rainbow LED lights and miscellaneous ornaments.
Now, the thing about this tree: it was ugly. Certainly. The decorations were not coordinated at all. Many of them were silly, like the collection of carved wooden animals that I liked to play with before placing them on the tree. Half the ornaments were homemade, from the numerous school art projects sent home right before winter break and then packed in suitcases as a gift for our grandparents. The colorful light bulbs made everything look hectic and a bit cluttered.
But we hadn’t worried about appearance when we decorated the tree. We didn’t care whether it was ugly, so we just allowed ourselves to have fun. We placed the wooden frog and the wooden brown bear next to each other, because they were friends and couldn’t be separated. We placed all the moose near the bottom, since they were afraid of heights. Despite being the heaviest ornament, the likeness of fisherman Santa Claus rode his speedboat to the top of the tree, right under the glittering star.
Visually, the ugly tree did not begin to compare to the beautifully grand decorations that we drove into town to admire, nor was it as pretty as the tall tree in the living room. However, the ugly tree was special. No matter how many Christmas trees we saw, the ugly tree would always be my favorite. The memories of laughing, playing, and decorating the tree together would always outweigh the physical beauty of coordinated trees. Those trees felt impersonal. The ugly tree was perfectly imperfect, as a Christmas tree should be.