The Christmas Pine: Pondering These Things in My Heart

I'm guest posting this Christmas season at A Thyme for Writers by Karen Van Den Huevel. Drop by to read this post there--and find all the archives for my monthly The Write Spice column for writers and ruminators, too. Also, check out Karen's informative articles on healthy, holistic habits as well as tons of writing tips for the Christian communicator.

 

 

Christmas Past

I remember when Daddy brought home the Christmas tree each year. In those days, we’d never think of using a fake tree. We weren’t quite into the trendy silver trees with revolving multi-colored lights, either.

No. Mom and Dad would only have a real tree!

Two weeks before Christmas we’d head to the tree lot and choose a nice full pine in just the right shape. Dad trimmed the base, dragged it through the front door into the living room, and secured it in the tree holder.

We had to wait for the lights to be strung and each bulb tested. But soon, we could begin opening all the ornament boxes and set to tree-trimming. We gently placed three or four silvery icicles on the branches and spaced out the colorful glass bulbs and home-made ornaments. Daddy made sure the tree-topper angel was in place. Together, as a family, we stood back to assess our festive work.

The beauty of this glorious work of nature, strung with man-made embellishments, immediately transformed the house. It cast a warm, restful glow throughout the living room—and our hearts. The pine scent’s restorative qualities alleviated stress and anxiety as it deodorized and freshened the entire house. With a deep breath, my whole body seemed rejuvenated and overflowing with a sense of great joy.

Our anticipation for Christmas Day increased as each morning passed with the comforting sight and scent of our wonderous Christmas tree. Mother kept it well-watered and checked the branches to be sure the greenery remained supple and soft. Tiny green needles peppering the carpet were easily removed with a daily vacuuming.

My favorite time to sit with the tree was in the evening. I’d turn all the lights off except for the glow of the bulbs on the tree. My once familiar home seemed entirely changed and beautified by its presence. Sitting in a chair facing the tree, breathing deep the healing properties of pine, and snuggling with my blanket or cat, the peace of the season permeated the sanctuary.

In these early days of my writing career, Christmas and its celebratory elements inspired me to wax poetic on the glory of the season. I still have my little green composition book from my childhood with neatly hand-written poems and short stories. Stirred by the delight, beauty, and sacred nature of mystery and wonder I felt deep inside, my words seemed to bubble forth from my spirit, ignited by His Spirit.

Not that I understood such a truth then. In matured hindsight, I know these things now. I treasure them—as Mary—pondering them in my heart.

Christmas Present

I expect this is why the Hallmark Channel, in recent years, has become so popular with their nostalgic, romantic, guilty-pleasure Christmas movies we all love to joke about and binge watch—savoring every sappy moment of them. Their writers employ predictable cliché plots, lines, settings, and characters, and we don’t try to edit them. Only at Christmas could they get away with this, and we are happy to let them do so.

We all want to live in Hallmark Christmas villages with every small-town pleasure in kith and kin. Hallmark writers have tapped into a shared sense of wonder that Christmas bestows on young and old. But perhaps what they’ve tapped into is more akin to hunger—for the innocent, childlike, simple joys that Christmas awakens in our humanity. That restorative quality Christmas brings with it. We never want it to end.

I never want Christmas to end. Or my tree to leave.

But as in Christmases past, time marches on. Year after year, the big day comes and goes—followed by a week of family visiting. We see everyone’s trees and gifts—aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. They pay a call to our home, too. Parties. Shopping. And counting the days before a new year supplants the old, and our Christmas respite is packed up in boxes until next time.

On New Year’s Day, the tree, which has brought us so much joy, is dismantled and removed to the trash pile, awaiting the garbage truck and its ultimate destination in the dump.

A sorrowful melancholy washes over me when I see disposed Christmas trees abandoned by the side of the road.

Even so, the pine scent lingers, and random needles might be stumbled upon in forgotten corners of the room in ensuing months. I may pause before vacuuming them up and cherish a transporting moment when I mentally return to my sanctuary in the glow of a glorious Christmas tree.

I’m glad we have seasons. There is a comfort in the repetition of precious moments throughout our lives. We hope that when Christmas comes around each year, we are grown a bit wiser and more able to appreciate the glory and beauty of the day. We hope we can better capture it in words on paper that may only ever be read by its writer—and the loving God Who so generously inspires our words with His Word made Flesh, dwelling among us.

Under the glow of the Christmas pine, I’m reading. I’m writing. I’m pondering things in my heart. Deep things shared with my Savior. I remember His birth and the beautification of the pine tree trimmed in lights and ornament remnants of lives lived from year to year.

A tree that was planted purposely for this job. Lived its allotted number of years. Was chopped down, to die. And then raised up in my home, alive again in a more glorious manner than before, transforming the entire atmosphere of my home with a newness of life.

It is a metaphor of Jesus Christ—His birth, life, death, resurrection, and the transformed life He lives in the home of my heart. Like the healing scent of pine, He vanquishes stress and anxiety, deodorizes and freshens the atmosphere of my life—beautifying the place of my sanctuary—and rejuvenates me with an overflowing sense of great joy, a glorious place for His feet to rest.

Journal Prompt:

Be ye blessed this Christmas as you ponder—and write—about these truths in your own life.

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