Many families have holiday traditions, and one of ours is dragging my mother’s Christmas tree out of the shed in our backyard.
It stays there all year (covered in a large black plastic garbage bag) until the Friday after Thanksgiving, when my husband, Mark, and I delicately transport it across the lawn, careful to not jiggle loose any of the ornaments that have hung on its limbs for the previous 365 days.
We always drop a few, which I then collect from the grass, a sort of yuletide reenactment of picking up Easter eggs. We’ve gotten good over the years at not breaking any of the green and gold glass globes, some also inherited from my mom, some from our own collection of ornaments amassed over the decades. Then, once the artificial 6-footer has been situated in front of our living room picture window, we slide off the plastic and voilà: It’s Christmas.
This tradition has its antecedents in yet another family ritual, one that predates a hard but necessary decision we made several years ago. It had become clear that my mother, Ginger, needed more help, and so she moved into an independent living apartment right down the road from us. Before that, every holiday season, Mark would go to her house in Terrell Hills and carefully move the Christmas tree (then covered in black plastic as well) from the hall closet where she stored it all year long. She kept a smallish square of carpet under the stand, and he’d drag the carpet, one hand on the tree pole, to the same corner of the living room where she displayed it each year. Off came the plastic and — voilà — it was Christmas.
Then he would hang up her outdoor Christmas lights.
My mother didn’t want to move out of her home, which she built with my late father in the 1950s before I was born and before they divorced when I was 6. It’s a Frank Lloyd Wright-looking structure with A-frame picture windows. They’d filled it with the sleek, modular furniture reflective of the Mad Men era; the walls held my artist father’s paintings.
After he was gone, Ginger raised her three daughters there by herself, and then two stepdaughters after she married my late stepfather, Bob, the year before I left for college. She developed a strong attachment to the home; it seemed a huge part of her identity. It’s impossible to count the number of family gatherings we held there through the decades: graduation parties, holiday festivities, birthday celebrations. Her bedroom smelled of her perfume.
We would knock at the front door and seconds later you could hear Ginger bustling through the living room, trilling out an excited “Coming!”
As my mother edged closer to her nineties, we tried various strategies to keep her in her home — namely, visiting health aides, who would invariably end up quitting — until the reality could no longer be denied. There had been some phone scammers, a fire in the microwave. Too many meals of delivered Domino’s pizza, the empty boxes stacked up in the kitchen.
We found the wonderful Morningside at the Meadows, with its gorgeous lobby, friendly staff and clean, comfortable apartments. The multistory complex is nestled next to Morningside’s assisted living and nursing home facilities, and we figured it could serve as a bridge to whatever might come later. (It’s our good fortune that the women in our family tend to live a long time.) Ginger didn’t want to go into independent living, and there was some pushback, but my sisters and I presented a united front and she eventually acquiesced.
It fell to my two sisters, Mark and me to box up her belongings, as the move entailed downsizing from a four-bedroom home to a one-bedroom apartment. We knew Ginger had always been something of a pack rat, loathe to throw away even an empty margarine container when it could be repurposed, but we had no idea the extent of her tendencies until we began going through closets.
She had kept her homework assignments from when she was an art student at Trinity University, drawings on onionskin paper of models holding poses. She’d kept check registers from her twenties. She’d seemingly never thrown a single thing away.
My mother had been a force of nature in her prime, a tireless advocate in San Antonio who helped start various organizations to propel women forward in the business world and in life. She was a mentor and a political agitator and sought-after public speaker and in general just the life of the party. A fashionista and careful dresser, she wore oversized baubles and full make-up, even for a trip to H-E-B. She didn’t know a stranger, and her passion for female advancement burned with all the fury of someone who discovered feminism relatively late in life.
Through the years she gained recognition for her work, and the walls and shelves of her home held a multiplicity of the objects society likes to bestow on those who shine in their field: plaques and medals and trophies, some so heavy they could disable a burglar.
My mother was proud of her awards and liked to display them, but where would they all go in her new place? We kept a few for the apartment and threw the rest away.
It was a stark object lesson for me, a journalist who had spent much of her career lusting after such public affirmation: The thrill of awards is ephemeral, it would seem, and while recognition is nice, in the end awards are just inanimate items, and it’s the work that matters.
We all experienced a sort of grief in letting go of our childhood home, which — after the estate sale and the flatbed truck that hauled off so much of our mother’s life — went on the real estate market and was soon sold. My older sister Mary found some words of comfort.
“The family is not the house,” she said. “The family is us. We’re the home.”
Sometimes grief takes the strangest forms. When I called the water company to tell them to turn off her utilities, I mentioned to the woman on the line that my mother had been a customer since the 1950s. “Tell your mother we appreciate her many years of service,” she said. I hung up and burst inexplicably into tears.
Clearly, it wasn’t just about the water.
Since then, I’ve sometimes driven by the house on Ivy Lane, which has new residents. I knew from the internet that the place had been gutted down to the studs and redone in neutral, modern grays and whites and minimalism, the inverse of my mother’s flamboyant, joyful cluttering. I idle in my car in front of the house — not too long to be stalker-y — and feel utterly baffled that I can’t still go inside and find my girlhood bedroom, the kitchen with its refrigerator magnets, the pink tiled bathroom where as a gawky teen I tried on lip gloss and the other tropes of young womanhood.
My mother had several good years in her apartment until it became clear once again that she needed more help, and she moved into a one-room efficiency in the assisted living facility. Her world got smaller once again. Not long ago, when Morningside started a major renovation, she was moved to the nursing home wing, where her life got smaller yet again. Now her belongings have been whittled down to those few things, at age 97, she truly needs: Her flowing caftans. Her hairbrush. Her ponytail scrunchies. Her Hillary Clinton biography, which she no longer reads but always has on the floor by her recliner.
And yet so much remains.
Ginger has the memory issues common to many people in their nineties. For all of her life an inveterate talker, my mother has grown quiet in this, the autumn of her days. But she’s still in there, and she says she’s happy. We come for a visit and she’ll be asleep in her recliner, or seated in the dining room, sometimes with her head in her hands, and the second she’s attuned to our presence, her face becomes suffused with joy. She knows us, and perhaps more importantly, we know her.
During my wayward adolescence, and occasionally in the years since, my mother and I would slip into the role of combatants, two strong personalities sporadically at loggerheads. But these years have occasioned a softening, a loosening in us both. I am now the greatest thing since sliced bread to her, and whatever old resentments I might have held in my heart have long since evaporated.
These years of reconciliation and love have been incredibly precious to me, a priceless gift.
I don’t know what will happen to the Christmas tree once Mark and I are gone. Perhaps our grown offspring, Sam, will inherit it, or one of Ginger’s other five grandkids. I do hope someone keeps up the tradition of the black garbage bag.
But if I’ve learned anything from this stage of my mother’s life, it’s this: The objects of our traditions aren’t the point, and neither are the pretty packages we wrap with care and place beneath the tree. Because, as a famous poet once wrote, nothing gold can stay. It’s the people around the tree who matter.
As my sister so sagely put it, it’s in their shining faces where we find our true home.
