Fractured tree

A small, fractured wooden Christmas tree and a pack of toy wolves on the author’s table are among the holiday decorations lingering well into the new year.

GHENT, N.Y. — The Russian Tea Room in New York City used to keep its Christmas decorations up year-round. We don’t go that far at our house but their staying power seems to have grown over the years.

Our Christmas tree still proudly stands in the corner of the living room, fully lighted, lavishly ornamented and freshly watered. And will for at least another week. My wife calls it the 45 days of Christmas.

And why not? I read somewhere (actually it was in the New York Times when I searched the Russian Tea Room and came upon a 1981 story about its decorations) that it’s bad luck to leave your tinsel and trappings up for too long.

I’m not overly superstitious. On a scale from mighty to meek when it comes to challenging the gods I fall somewhere in the solid occasionally-looking-over-my-shoulder middle. And as long as your blue spruce or Scotch pine doesn’t pose a fire hazard I don’t see the harm in amortizing the cost of your investment as long as possible.

Of course, there comes a point when hugging the holidays starts to get creepy, even before the needles cascade to the ground. But Feb. 1 seems to be a more-than-acceptable expiration date. Wreaths can bedeck your front door even longer.

If you’re seeking moral support for your decision, as I sometimes do as a self-conscious and not entirely socially secure individual, one need look no further than The Fund for Park Avenue in New York City. That’s the group that bankrolls the tradition, started during World War II, to decorate much of the length of Park Avenue’s center traffic islands with festively lighted Christmas trees.

I returned to the city this week and their conifers are still blazing brightly. So my feeling is that if the deep-pocketed swells who underwrite that lightshow are reluctant to dismantle the decorations deep into January, why should I jump the gun and drag our still robust specimen off to our makeshift Christmas tree graveyard?

That also goes for the table in the front hall still bedazzled with holiday lights, a small fractured wooden Christmas tree — I like to think of it as a physical manifestation of our family’s sense of humor rather than as a metaphor for the psychic scars we’ve all suffered over the last many months — and a pack of toy wolves.

And our holiday cards, too. My wife, following in her mother’s tradition, staples them to red ribbon and hangs them from the walls in the foyer. They remain swinging in the breeze whenever the front door opens to let the dog out.

I was taken by surprise, however, when my spouse balked after I graciously volunteered to dismantle the Danbury Mint Boston Terrier Dog Christmas Tree lighted figurine, a conversation starter that I see is currently on sale at eBay for 300 bucks, used.

Perhaps a bit of background is required. My mother was something of a Boston Terrier fanatic — she owned five of them (consecutively not concurrently) — and when she passed away in 2019 there was a mad scramble among her children and grandchildren to pass up the opportunity to inherit this foot-tall atrocity.

Since nobody else wanted it and knowing how much it meant to my mother it took up residence in our garage, where my wife though it should stay, even during the holidays. If it meant so much to me, she reasoned, unite it with an electrical socket out there.

I did but it wasn’t the same as when it sat, year-round, on the mantelpiece in my mother’s bedroom. So I snuck it into the house and onto a table removed from public view where, unbeknownst to me my spouse, apparently, developed some sort of backhanded affection for it. I’m not planning to leave it there, a la my mom, until Xmas 2021. It’s heading back to the garage. But my hope is that I’ll be met with less resistance when I dust off the cobwebs next Christmas.

Perhaps the best argument for leaving your tree and lights shining deep into January — our stockings were the first to go, a decision with which I concur, because they’re so closely associated with the excitement and evanescence of Christmas Eve, with the patter of tiny hooves and Santa struggling down the chimney — is the temporary despondency that sets in once you remove them and return the lamps and furniture to their pre-holiday locations.

The dismantling of the tree and the storage of the ornaments is left to my wife. But the destiny of the denuded fir is my solemn responsibility. Fortunately, the journey from our front door to the woods is no more than 50 feet, an easily dragable distance.

There this year’s standard bearer will join its ancestors from Christmas pasts. As melancholy as the ritual is there’s more than a little solace in watching it slowly decompose and return to the soil, to transform itself into the stuff of future trees and happy holidays yet to come.

Ralph Gardner Jr. is a journalist whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and The New Yorker. He can be reached at ralph@ralphgardner.com. The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of The Berkshire Eagle.