Holiday wishes for more than mere gifts

I should have sent a "Best Wishes to You and Yours" letter right after my husband and I agreed that seasonal conflict over a spruce versus a pine was moot. The last five years we've had lovely but lethally sharp-needled Sitka spruce trees, courtesy of the Boy Scouts. If you wear leather gloves decorating them, they are not that bad. Crawling under one to plug in the lights felt like bumping into a porcupine. The last time we went looking for a pine, which typically grow in cliffs or swamps, someone either fell and almost broke a bone or else got wet and nearly froze their toes off. Still, pines are my favorite; they are soft needled, sweet smelling and keep well.

It was such a nice morning; we decided to cut a tree ourselves. We found the folding saw and woke up the dogs but let the sleeping teenager lie. She's my fifth one. I've learned a few things from her siblings, like family tree cutting is much happier with fewer family members involved.

We walked into the rising sun, on the dry sand left by the ebbing tide, making forays up into the crunchy snow to the woods, spotting one perfect spruce after another, which I took as an omen for a perfect holiday, which can be a challenge.

My husband doesn't like Christmas; he never has. He falls asleep during midnight Mass and prefers noisy family feasts with more emphasis on stuffing than stuff. So for him, all eight of us (we have a son-in-law now) are spending the weekend before Christmas up at a cabin two miles off the road, without running water or electricity. I'm feeling better already, just thinking about that.

Did I mention the ash yet? Give me a minute.

We did find the perfect tree, a pine no less. (Another good omen.) As soon as I trimmed it I knew it was perfect, the best tree ever.

When the sleeping teenager saw it she said, "Why do the trees keep getting smaller every year?"

When the graduate student daughter saw it she said "Oh how cute, it's a real Charlie Brown tree."

When my friend Matt saw it he said, "What happened to the rest of the branches?"

When my son-in-law saw it he said, " It looks like someone gave it a bad haircut."

I turned to my husband for support. He said "Maybe you should put some more lights on it?"

The next morning he decided to clean out the wood stove before starting the fire. I woke to the roar of the Shop-Vac and then the more urgent roar of him swearing. Turns out the ashes were going in one end of the machine and shooting out the other.

Our house looked like Mount St. Augustine had erupted. (Here is where my husband will say I'm exaggerating. Let's just say it looked like that to me.) The tree was coated with gray dust, as were the table, the couch, the books in the shelves and the budding narcissus bulbs.

I had, as the old hymn goes, made my house fair as I am able. I'd even washed the windows. Now everything was ruined, and the perfect tree looked like it had survived a forest fire.

I was so angry I couldn't speak.

I dusted, vacuumed, wiped and prayed. I confessed that not only did I not love my neighbors as myself, I didn't even like my family very much. Then I bought a bunch of stocking stuffers -- lip balm, sports bars, skin cream and Swiss cough drops -- took a long walk up a steep mountain on snowshoes and thought about Sunday's carol sing-a-long at the library.

About 30 of us formed a kind of community choir, which Nancy Nash directed because Bob Plucker, who usually does, had the flu. He'd gotten it from his daughter-in-law Holly Davis, who Nancy also filled in for last week, directing the nativity pageant. Anyway, we were so confident in our harmonies that we even sang selections from the Messiah, hard ones, like "For Unto Us a Child is Born." An outsider might have heard some missed entrances or sharp notes, but if you asked any of us we would have said it was perfect.

Music really is the sweetest when you make it with others, and likewise the holidays are more about who you spend them with than what you do or buy or what your house looks like.

So here then is "A Holiday Wish For You." I hope you don't get the flu, that your teenagers are in a good mood, your babies don't choke on a toy and your elders are still with you. I hope your spouse, partner, or housemate doesn't clean the wood stove until after the holidays. I would also suggest you shop in the neighborhood. It spreads joy all the way around and you may make a new friend. I wish you fresh snow and smooth ice, and mostly a warm place to come home to, with the people and pets you love close by.

Heather Lende lives and writes in Haines and is the author of "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name." She can be reached at hlende@adnmail.com.