Watching: The West Wing.

Reading: Midwives by Chris Bohjalian. Like Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, Midwives is a novel written by a man from a female point of view. Both authors are successful in getting inside their female protagonists' heads.

On Not Taking Down the Tree

Our Christmas tree is holding up remarkably well, having dropped few if any needles. Last night I was sitting on the couch next to the tree, absently pulling on the branches while talking on the phone, and I realized that I had to tug really hard to pull any needles off at all.

Tab told his department manager about our tree when he went back to work this week. Susan was the person who first introduced us to concolor firs, which are her husband's favorite Christmas trees. This year Susan's husband drove to Somerville, thirty miles away, to purchase a cut one for $65 from a tree stand. Susan was astounded when Tab told her there is a Christmas tree farm less than three miles from her house where we bought ours for thirty-five bucks.

We usually keep our tree up at least until Epiphany, and longer than that if we got it up late, as we did this year. Tab would happily leave it up until the end of January, but I am usually ready to get rid of it a few weeks earlier than he is.

When my family moved to Maine in the late '70s, we were surprised to see how quickly the people there took their Christmas trees down. Most of them put their trees up the weekend after Thanksgiving and take them down the day after Christmas. Some even take their trees down on Christmas Day itself! When I lived in Portland after college, friends of mine liked to collect Christmas trees that had been thrown out for trash pickup and take them to the beach at Scarborough for a bonfire on New Year's Eve.

I don't like rushing the end of the season by taking the tree down that soon, however. January is such a long, bleak month with no holidays, and spring is so far away. Why not celebrate the full twelve days of Christmas?

I always feel a little sad when I take off the ornaments, wrap them in their archival-quality tissue paper and store them in large boxes. Tab and I have amassed a sizable collection of ornaments in the twelve years we've been living together, more than would even fit on this medium-sized tree. We had very few on our first Christmas tree, as I recall. Tab's mother took one look at it and promptly offered to give us all of her ornaments, but we refused since we wanted to build our own collection. "Besides," I said to Tab after she'd left, "it's not like the Christmas Tree Police are going to arrest us for not having enough decorations."

In the years that followed we bought whatever ornaments we saw that appealed to us. Tab is nutty about Christmas shops, so whenever we travel anywhere we usually find a Christmas store and buy an ornament or two as a keepsake of our trip. We label each with the date and location of purchase. Opening the box of ornaments each December is like opening a time capsule: "Remember that shop in Chincoteague where we found this shell ornament?" Remember buying this whale ornament in Bar Harbor after our whale watching trip?" All of our favorite ornaments have stories connected with them.

We bought even more ornaments after we became parents. I borrowed my sister Lori's idea of giving each of the boys an ornament a year. One day, when they have homes of their own, they can take their boxes of ornaments with them for their own Christmas trees. Odds are, though, at least one of them will end up with a wife who insists on using only antique Victorian ornaments in a color scheme of silver and mauve.

As eclectic and hodgepodge as our tree is, we think it is a thing of beauty, and we will be sorry to see it go.

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