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Show 1 8 i I ' ' M j l ; -1?. (Vu by Tcrl Gomes 5 i Oh, Christmas tree, oh, woe is me 6 This past weekend our family got our Christmas tree. It is something we do every year at this time. d Traditionally, it is a stressless event, except for writing the check for the purchase, j Not so, this year. p Oh, getting the tree was really pretty easy. We 2 checked out all the local lots and settled on a tree with a A terrific shape from Park City Nursery. (Terrific shape to fj me is one I can sympathize with fat on the bottom and skinny on the top.) We even grabbed some of the fi freshest mistletoe I've seen in any holiday season in 5 Utah. Feeling festive, we hummed carols in the car as we drove the tree home. S Once home we agreed the tree should be in its normal i place of prominence in the front window. But the piano i now looked crowded with this huge tree in that end of the 5 ' room. So we moved the piano down just a little bit. iV With the piano further in to the room, the buffet looked y too heavy on the same wall. In fact, it no longer looked jS right in the room at all. We moved it to the family room. 1 But if the buffet was going to be in the family room, it made no sense to have the dining room table in the other !v room. So we moved the dining room table in with the buffet. ;j Now we had the dining room table and the buffet in with the television and limited seating space. We moved P the television into the living room. We tried it in the S comer. We tried it next to the fireplace. We put it on a short - ii table, an antique sewing machine table and a covered 5 picnic bench. They all looked awful. So we moved the bookcase in from the family room and put the television But now the grandfather clock on the wall looked off Si balance with the television on that side of the room. We J moved the clock to where a favorite old art deco mirrorpainting had been. fj It was at exactly this point I remember asking my 5 husband where we should hang the mirror painting, ij Normally my husband is a patient man. A kind man. M Even on occasion a sympathetic man. His reaction came y, as a genuine surprise. J "Nowhere. In fact, you can take that mirror and stick it g in the garage. I've always hated that thing." His tone was, shall we say, agitated. ' I was (temporarily) speechless. The mirror had been a gift to me from a lady friend just after my marriage to this man. In nearly five years he had never said he hated the mirror. If I didn't know that about him, about something I was really quite fond of, well, what else didn't I know? Maybe it was the evergreen heavy in the air I had been inhaling in my nostrils, or the dustballs from moving all the rarely-moved furniture, but something in me snapped. "Do you hate this painting?" I questioned. "How about the couch? Or maybe the lamp? Have you ever liked . . ." and I started pointing out various knickknacks and bric-a-brac in both rooms. My God, it was like one of those early '70s encounter groups. "It's OK . . . No, I've never been crazy about it . . . The color is odd, but the shade's all right Yes No . . . It's all right." " ' " These were revelations. Day in and year out we have lived with basically the same furniture and trappings. And now, now I find out what I thought was cozy he felt was cluttered. What I thought was ugly, he deemed comfortable. Late that night when we were moving the stereo speakers for thethird time that day and my joints were aching from the tugging and lifting and moving and shifting, I looked over in the living room window at the tree. It didn't have a light or a candy cane on it yet we were too tired from moving furniture all day to decorate it. Just then my husband came over and gave me a hug. "This sure has been fun to do," he said. "I really like the change." I looked at the tree again. And I looked at the mirrorpainting lying on the floor. And it struck a vein with me, maybe part of the Christmas spirit is about giving up things as well as giving things. And as I picked up the mirror to take it to the garage my husband gave me a kiss. We both looked over at the piano and decided it was too far into the room it needed to get moved back a bit . . . almost to where it was in the first place. That's when we started to laugh. I think, even underrated, this my favorite Christmas tree in yeais. |