A Christmas Tree Brings Back Memories

A Christmas tree brings back memories.

Getting down on my knees, I am level with the small one in my bedroom, and among the gold lights I can see the treasures hanging from the branches.

There is the star-shaped gingerbread cookie hanging from a red ribbon, still hanging because the day my four-year-old self picked it out at church I decided that it was too pretty to eat. Well over a decade later, the cookie still has its cinnamon aroma.

There is the figure of a little girl with little ballet shoes and a little tulle skirt and a little nutcracker, all a testament to one day when I was a little girl and my mother treated me to dinner at a fancy restaurant before watching the performance at the theatre downtown.

There is the ornament a friend of mine made for me back in 2018, as the year Sharpied on the back reminds me. Was that the year we dumped sugar everywhere to make a snowstorm around our gingerbread houses? We still made the houses this year, but not all the snow…

There are the ones my Awana leader makes for me every year, last year a manger scene, this year a Christmas star. It seems like there will always be a star to point me in the right direction, doesn’t it?

There are the Hallmark ones my mom picks out for my siblings and I every year. For me this year, it’s a miniature coffee cup, hopefully not a reminder of the frequent exhaustion that comes with being a high school senior. In tiny letters, the cup has the name of my comfort show–that show my mom and I always watched while the adrenaline still pulsed through my veins after last spring’s track meets, or sometimes on those autumn nights when I needed comfort after a long day.

There are the seahorse and the dolphin figures from those day trips to Newport Beach. They’re reminders that I’ve spent every Christmas at home on the southern California coast, often dipping my toes in the freezing Pacific ocean while wondering what it would be like to experience a white Christmas.

This is my last Christmas before I’m an adult, I suddenly remember.

And yet looking back at all these years makes me realize that some things don’t change as quickly as we may think.

I’ll still come home to this stretch of the shore, and this Christmas tree will still bring back memories. It forever will. It’s an evergreen, after all. A fake one nonetheless, but with memories that are real and eternal.

Real and eternal, just like the love that it represents. The love of a Savior asking us year after year to come back home. Two thousand years have passed since His first coming, and He’s still asking.

Getting down on your knees, you may hear His voice in your heart.

Merry Christmas, my readers. < 3