A Christmas Tree Story

As it happens, this post is the 100th post that I am writing for The Grandstander in calendar year 2025.  While I didn't plan it this way, it turns out that I will use this occasion to practice a little personal self-therapy.  Feel free to skip it if you so choose.

The year marks the fifth Christmas since Marilyn died, and her loss in my life seems to be particularly acute at this time of the year.  Five Christmases and it hasn't gotten any easier.  This year, the thing that seemed to really jump out at me were Christmas Tree ornaments.

Let me take a time out here to be very clear about one thing.  For these past three plus years, I have been moving on in my New Life with Linda.  We have been making our own Life Memories and Christmas Memories.  I am at a wonderful stage in my life, and I couldn't be happier.  That doesn't mean that my life before October, 2021 leaves my personal history, nor does it erase all of the memories that were made up until that date.  It is an example, maybe the best example, of "two things can be true at the same time."  

Okay, back to the ornaments.  For the first couple of years that we were together, Linda and I tried to mix-and-match each of our collections of Christmas Tree ornaments, and we came to the conclusion that that just didn't work.  Last year, 2024, we decided to start anew.  We bought a beautiful new tree, and went with a whole new theme with the ornaments.  This is our second year for this arrangement, and trust me, both the tree and house look festive and beautiful.  We love it.

Still, something stirred in me this year that made me think...What do you do with tree ornaments that you had accumulated through 47 years of marriage, many of them bought during memorable vacations or were gifted to you over the years or on some other meaningful occasion in your life?  Conversations between Linda and I, as well as a conversation with a good friend of mine who, like me, lost his wife some years ago, and a session with my own therapist led to an idea:  Have your own tree.  A smaller one and set it up in a different room of the house, and decorate it with those ornaments that were special to me in the First Chapter of my life.

I wasn't sure that this was something that I wanted to do, that I would be able to do.  Then Linda came home on Friday with a small table top tree.  A real tree, like Marilyn loved.  "If you don't feel you can do this, that's okay, and we can just put it out with the trash" she said.  Frankly, it took me by surprise, and my first inclination was to not do this, but then I decided that I would do it.  

On Friday night, Linda sat with me as I went through the box of "Bob and Marilyn ornaments", and listened to me tell stories about many of them.  I actually was able to separate some of them out of the collection and literally get rid of them.  That still left a box with a significant number of ornaments, and on Saturday, while I was home alone, I decorated this tree that now sits in our home office.

Decorating this tree certainly had its emotional moments.  I shed some tears, but mostly I smiled at all the memories associated with those ornaments, and memories of wonderful Christmases from 1974 through 2020 came flooding back to me.  

I will keep all of those Bob and Marilyn Ornaments going forward in a special box, and my plan now is to do this separate, special small tree in the Christmas seasons that lie ahead for me.  However, beginning next year, it won't be a real tree.  Marilyn won't approve, but I think she will understand.  I also think it likely that Linda will probably side with Marilyn and make me get a real one anyway.  Or maybe, having done it this year, I'll discover that I won't need to do it again.  We'll see.

I close by sending special thanks to Roger and Denise and Ronda, to Wendy, and especially to Linda, who is making this Second Chapter of my life so, so wonderful.

If you have read your way through all of this, I appreciate it.

Merry Christmas.