MANY CHRISTMAS TREES AGO…

Christmas is upon us once more and our little coastal town is lit up with the brilliance of this magical season. People have been complaining about how our young mayor has been shelving all glaring issues, like our roads and pavements, which are badly in need of repair and invested tidy sums in adorning the town with twinkling lights and golden orbs and angels and reindeer strung up high in the streets and shimmering Christmas trees standing tall and pointing like beacons into the night sky. He’s even hung up speakers in strategic places drumming out the beat of Xmas favourites… I WISH IT COULD BE CHRISTMAS EVERYDAY…and for the young and romantic…ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU… to infuse our pandemic weary bodies and minds with a surge of Christmas cheer. Well…what the heck…our potholed roads and uneven pavements can wait. After all, we’ve learnt to drive around the holes or bump in and out of them and walk in peculiar and guarded ways to avoid too much bodily harm. Much better than in Vilnius in Lithuania, when we visited, where the pavements were pitted or with slabs missing which sent us stumbling forward, groping the air and in parts so worn out and slippery smooth that I went skidding and landed hard on my then bony bottom. So in the face of all that, Chania’s not so bad really…we can wait a little longer for those basic amenities and…in the meantime… feast our eyes on the night time splendour and `rock around the Christmas tree’ in the market square.

This brings me to our Christmases of yesteryears when we were a young family, Yiannis, myself and Annie. Before the renovations, the house was old and draughty. Every Christmas we would resurrect the weary family tree. Before that it had lain in state and gathered dust in the loft for so many years. We would also drag out the two dusty boxes of decorations from the storage space under the creaky wooden staircase. This was all done in the eleventh hour on Christmas Eve. The poor tree was in such bad shape that it was squeezed in a corner to hide its inadequacies and the decorations hung haphazardly with the lights and tinsel garlands wrapped around it hastily. In those years our priorities were stacked differently … particularly mine… I was young and self-indulgent… more interested in buying lovely clothes for the three of us and fingering some exquisite jewellery at the stores and sniffing some new fragrances and experimenting with slicks of new lip colours…actually newer versions of the same colour.

This went on for a couple of years until we renovated the house and it looked so smart and spruced up that our shabby old tree and decorations looked like poor relatives who had drifted in…uninvited. We needed a new one and…just any old tree wouldn’t do. I wanted a LIVE tree, a conifer from some snowy slope, exuding the scent of alpine freshness, sharp citrusy and piney . There was a nursery that sold cut firs and potted firs and we heaved a middle-sized potted one home. This time, with branches extended and showering our gleaming white marble floor with needles of forest green, it held court in our living room… decked with exquisite Christmas baubles… glass balls, transparent with brush strokes of silver and gold, ballerinas in different poses in gold and others in white tulle tutus and glassy red stars dangling and catching the winking little lights and crystal angels with golden wings and halos. And every year, with every tree, I threw in more additions.

But the thing about a live tree is…what do you do with it after Christmas? Most people drag them out and leave them, forlorn and abandoned waiting for the city council trucks to haul them away to their final destination… the maw of an incinerator. I was having none of that…I was a nature lover and had deep empathy for trees…and that’s why I had bought a potted one. The man assured me it had roots and I could replant it in the garden. But WHOA! Christmas tree after Christmas tree and our garden would turn into a conifer grove! So I left it in the pot out in the cold after the festivities and it thrived and even lasted out the summer. I was thrilled and come the following Christmas, we lifted it carefully and brought it in again. It had grown taller…but never mind I bought more decorations. Alas, it didn’t make it to the next year and so I bought another potted one. Once again, after the fun and joy, out it went to breathe some fresh air and hopefully grace us with its presence the next year. But this time the tree died in the pot after the winter months…never mind…all living things come to a natural end…much more dignified than chucking it out in the street. So the next Christmas I bought another one. When Annie and I were hanging up the decorations, we found that our fingers were getting sticky. WHAT ON EARTH??? And we peered into the tree…and LO…the branches were full of these beetle-like insects, chewing on the bark and dripping droplets of resin from their chins…presumably. We displayed such alarming behaviour that the man of the house rushed to the scene…dragged it out and sprayed and washed it down. The next day we gave the tree a good shaking out and gingerly hung its Christmas jewels. And like everyone else…after the Xmas celebrations, we pulled it out in the street…and that was the last of our live trees. And now, for the last ten years or so, we’ve had…oh well… an artificial tree and it’s just as beautiful with our treasured ornaments.

Coming back to our local scene, last Friday, on one of my nightly walks into town, to breathe in the cold and the magic of the season, I stood in awe, together with a group of children and their parents, in front of the gigantic Christmas tree in the market square, a pyramid of glittering golden lights. Celine Dion’s voice broke out of the speakers with…` O Holy night the stars are brightly shining…’ and we stood mesmerized, wrapped in a soft cloud of magic and… the high notes… like a shot of opiate… levitated us to another world. Thumbs up to Mr Mayor!

So have a Joyful Christmas and a Brilliant New Year with Good Tidings!

Cheers!