For Those Who Celebrate Christmas, Are You Getting Your Tree Sooner or Later?

So, Thanksgiving is soooo one day from now. Aside from figuring out which recipe to use for baking corn bread for Thursday's dinner, I, alas, am set for Turkey day, since my sister is graciously hosting.

So, I'm focused on the future, which is Christmas. And, I'm contemplating where to buy our family tree.

Come on, I'm not alone in mentally leapfrogging over Thanksgiving to Christmas. Stores around Walnut Creek have had their faux pine garlands on display since at least before Halloween.

In our family, we established the tradition of buying our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving. And, by the way, our family is not religious, we don't go to church, and we have not incorporated the teachings of Jesus Christ into a spiritual tradition that any of us follow individually or as a family.

So, yes, Christmas for me is all about the gingerbread, songs, 1940s movies and getting together with family. I love all that stuff, and that's why I happen to like this particular holiday—or rather, the lead-up to it. I delight in stretching this lead-up out as long as possible.

However, for me it is typically the anticipation of the day, more than the day itself, that I love. I say typically because here's a true confession: All apologies to my husband, but planning our wedding was thrilling. The day itself, with all its deep, life-changing significance? Not as thrilling in comparison. The only event that exceeded all expectations and months of eager anticipation was the birth of my son. And, yes, I am seeing a therapist to address this and many other issues.

So, I'm the type of person who wants to get the Christmas tree as soon as possible. I like to have that wonderful Christmas tree smell filling my living room, and to be able to gaze onto the tree, with its lights and ornaments, filling my living room window.

Others are not in such a rush to buy their trees. And, yes, there are certain problems to buying a tree too early. One year, our tree was mighty dried out by December 24, and I worried we had a fire hazard on our hands.

My older brother, who happens to be more practical than me, talked about liking to wait until Christmas Eve—when he and his family could get good deals on trees. But I think his kids, as they got older, started nudging mom and dad to get their trees a few weeks earlier.

Actually, the idea of waiting until Christmas Eve to set up and "trim" the tree has a charm to it. It's a tradition in some European countries, and it makes me think of a festive scene in a 19th century British novel.

But, no, I can't wait to get that Christmas tree. My anticipation is already running pretty high.

I expect we might go to the Honey Bear Trees lot, which is not in Walnut Creek but in Lafayette, across Pleasant Hill Road from Acalanes High School.

Twenty percent of what we pay for the tree, wreathes and any other purchases goes to support the Walnut Creek Education Foundation, the nonprofit that supports schools in the Walnut Creek School District and Las Lomas High School. I passed by the lot Tuesday.

It opened on Monday, so apparently some people are even more eager to get ahold of their trees than me. The lot will be open through Dec. 24.

Do you have another place you like to go? And why? What's your family Christmas tree tradition?

Change of seasons, just in my own little corner of the world

Out with the Christmas tree. Waiting for recyling removal this week.

Sigh.

In with the camellias. And despite the cold and mists of recent days: how seeing those pink blossoms can't help but make me think of you know what ...

Christmas elves strike! Sad but spirited tree gets trimmed in style!

It's not quite an extreme makeover but an evergreen I featured over the weekend (see below), as perhaps almost as interesting as Concord's Charlie Brown Christmas tree received some major TLC. And, the tree, in some mystery location in Walnut Creek (though one reader previously guessed it right), apparently belongs to us all. Or to Caltrans. Who knows? Good job, Elves!

Do you have to be Christian to celebrate Christmas?

A couple years ago, I was helping at the holiday party for my son’s fourth-grade class. One of son’s classmates came up to me and asked me why our family celebrated Christmas. He said my son had told other classmates that we’re not Christian.

I was speechless for the 5 seconds it took before that boy was distracted by the opportunity to go slather green frosting on some Christmas tree-shaped cookies.

To be honest, I didn’t have an answer for him, other than to admit that, yeah, our family is not religious, we don’t go to church, and we have not incorporated the teachings of Jesus Christ into a spiritual tradition that any of us follow individually or as a family. Therefore, you could say we are not Christian.

(But I do have a fondness for those gorgeous Medieval and early Renaissance paintings that tended to focus on Christian themes, including the nativity and the crucifixion, including the one above, from the 1480s by Domenico Ghirlandaio.)

And why do we celebrate Christmas? I guess because we, like many other Americans who are or who are not religious, like all the festivities associated with the holiday: trimming the tree, hearing the carols, getting together with family, eating gingerbread, and watching those hokey but uplifting Christmas movies.

All this was a bit too much to get into with a fourth-grader at a school holiday party. I didn’t mind the question, and it has prompted certain discussions in our family about religion and faith. For others, such a question about the “meaning of Christmas” and who should or can celebrate it will also raise long-standing complaints about how the holiday has become overly commercial, with Black Friday stampedes and kids growing up to worry only about what they are going to get, get, get on Christmas morning.

Culturally, I would be defined as a WASP (white anglo-saxon Protestant), but I have never regularly attended any church services in my life, Protestant or otherwise. My mother was raised Presbyterian, but in a manner she found restrictive and judgmental. Early in her marriage, she desperately looked for a church to belong to and to which to take my older siblings. She never found that church, and gave up by the time I came along. It’s too bad for her that she never found her church, because she always seemed to have that longing to have something spiritual in her life.

I’ve never really had that longing, but, oddly, one of the things that originally attracted me to my husband was that he was a practicing, though not strict—because he was dating me—Catholic. He attended mass on a regular basis and took communion. His faith intrigued me. It struck me as mysterious and romantic, and I accompanied him to mass, though I never could have embraced it for myself. And he never expected me to. That other people have faith intrigues me, probably because in some people, I see how it inspires them to act with amazing grace and courage in their lives. I saw that this was true with my husband.

My husband’s attachment to Catholicism waned, in part because he grew disgusted with the Church’s handling of its clergy molestation scandal. But, he also found that Catholicism did not help him in dealing with his mental illness. He’s Mr. Buddhism now.

It should come as no surprise that we did not raise our son in any religion, which to some might make us derelict parents. In any event, my son has been a skeptic since he was 3 or 4 when he declared that Santa Claus was not real.

We did not raise our son telling him that there was no Santa Claus—or that there was no God, either. But I never talked to him as if I believed God existed, because, honestly, I don’t know.

Recently our son said to us, “No one has ever scientifically proven there is a God.”

I responded: “No one has ever proven there is not.”

I offered the idea that perhaps faith is an act of love. You love someone or some thing, or you don’t. You have faith, or you don’t.

I hear that Americans are overwhelmingly religious and Christian, but maybe that’s not entirely the case. “The American population self-identifies as predominantly Christian but Americans are slowly becoming less Christian,” according to the American Religious Identification Survey 2009, prepared by Trinity College in Connecticut. “Eighty-six percent of American adults identified as Christians in 1990 and 76 percent in 2008.”

And then there are the “Nones.” The "Nones" are those with no stated religious preference, or who call themselves atheist or agnostic. This category continues “to grow,” from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008. "The rise of the 'Nones' has been one of the most important trends on the American religious scene since 1990," the study says.

"The overall rate of growth of those expressing no religious preference slowed after 2001 but the numbers offering a specific self-identification as agnostic or atheist rose markedly from over a million in 1990 to about 2 million in 2001 to about 3.6 million today," the study continues.

If that’s the case, I wonder how much of these other “Nones” also put up Christmas trees, eat gingerbread and drink eggnog in the days leading up to December 25, and get together on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with family and friends to eat, enjoy one another's company and to exchange presents.

A Christmas tree with almost as much spirit at Concord's "Charlie Brown" tree

Someone decided this roadside evergreen needed a little holiday spirit. So, here you go. Happened to see it, standing tall in the rain storm, with its few garlands and ornaments, while out and about doing errands. Can you guess where it is?

It's Team Edward on the top of our Christmas Tree!

It's become a tradition in our Crazy family to annually grace the top of our Christmas tree with a beloved figure of pop culture. Last year, we did Baby Stewie from The Family Guy. In years past, we've welcomed to this honored place in our home Napoleon Dynamite, Wile E. Coyote, and Darth Vader.

This year, we debated putting angel wings on Sarah Palin (our national savior, right?), but we decided to hop on the Twilight craze. I raced to Walnut Creek's Target and tried to find two special Twilight Barbies: vampire Edward and werewolf Jacob. We intended to have both on top of our tree, but I could only find Edward. Maybe the Jacob dolls were sold out?

Well, it worked out because my son happens to detest Jacob. He complained that the Jacob sections of the Twilight books were long and tedious and that Jacob whined far too much.

So, there you go: We're with Team Edward in this epic battle. Oh, and what's cool about this Edward doll is that, in certain light, he sparkles!

Friend faces disapproving looks while considering an artificial tree at Walnut Creek's Target

My friend was telling me about how he had gone into Walnut Creek's Target the other day and was in the aisle looking at artificial trees to purchase.

He is Indian, and he says that, among friends and family who have come from that South Asian nation to the United States, it is common to put up a Christmas tree, but one that is artificial. In his view, it's more economical in that you don't have to buy a new one year after year.

Well, apparently he had gone looking for artificial trees at Targets and other stores in and around Fremont, where he and his wife live with their newborn baby. Not an artificial tree to be found down there, but, as he notes, Fremont is home to a large number of Indian immigrants. So, presumably, those other Indians snapped up all the artificial trees in stock.

During a lunch break from his job in Walnut Creek, he stopped in at our local Target.

There were a number of artificial trees to choose from. But, he reports, he was getting some "dirty looks" from other shoppers. And he wondered if it was because--gasp--he was considering buying an artificial tree!! He was violating some kind of holiday fashion code that says "Thou shalt only put up a real tree in your home."

He said, laughingly, that he called his wife in a panic, saying he was afraid to buy one in Walnut Creek. I could see him worrying about being run out of the store by members of the Walnut Creek chapter of the Church of Martha Stewart Living. (Speaking of Martha: have you made your homemade popcorn garland yet?)

He concluded that no one in Walnut Creek buys artificial Christmas trees, but I suggested one market for them would be our residents of Rossmoor and other seniors, who perhaps wouldn't want to deal with the yearly hassle of buying and putting up a fresh tree.

In any event, my friend left Target empty handed. Maybe he'll have better luck this weekend, and feel more comfortable buying one closer to home.