Christmas is her jam. Christmas has been a reliably good holiday for most of her life. Christmas had been her mom’s thing; her mom, who had her troubles throughout the other 364 days of the year, always made an awesome Christmas, handed down her Christmas traditions, and long before the wife was a wife she always got a tree, carried trees by herself from Broadway and 86th to her apartment on 85th and Riverside, carried trees from 72nd and Amsterdam up five flights to her apartment on 73rd and Columbus, shoved trees into the back of her K-car in Chicago and up a flight to her apartment on Oakley and Erie, often had a tree-trimming party or some other celebration with friends, and had eighteen years of trees as a single adult before she got married.
She is determined to have a merry fucking first Christmas single. This first Christmas single will be so fucking merry she will have two, one in New York with friends and one in Iowa with family, and the one in New York will start with the biggest tree. The apartment has extremely high ceilings. She will get a tree that is as close to the ceiling as it can get. She will go back to her house upstate and fetch her ornaments. Her bud is also super into Christmas. The kid confirms that her dad is super into Christmas. He’s stoked to get a tree. But he’s out of town and his trip is running long and then she’s going to be out of town and time is running out. She texts the kid to say I need to get a tree ASAP, can’t wait for your dad. The kid texts back No no you have to wait, he’ll be really upset. She texts her bud and says I need a treeeeee with four tree emojis and he texts back:
No
Weeeeee need a treeeee
She texts:
Your kid said you’d be mad if I got one before you came home
He texts:
I’m head of the household (wink emoji)
So I pick the treeee
Then the women tell me no
Then we get the tree you like
But I have to go through the big shot process first and then cave in to what everyone else wants.
Her bud takes the red-eye home. They go straight out for coffee and bagels and in search of more ornaments and lights and a stand. They can’t find a proper star so they order a star for the top. They go down Second Avenue to look at trees. Her bud pulls out a fluffy one right in front. It’s 350 bucks. Their eyes widen. Her bud asks one of the tree guys what they have closer to 150. Frankly they both think 150 is a lot, both of them have been buying trees for half that at Home Depot for the last bunch of years, but this is NYC, and the tree guys have you at their mercy. They’re all freshly cut, within the last two days, in North Carolina, tree guy says. Tree guy shows them some lesser trees that still look pretty darn good. Tree guy shows them some even taller trees, trees for people with duplex apartments. Those go for eight hundred and up, he says.
Okay let’s go back and look at those other ones, they say. They settle on one that looks like it will reach pretty close to their ceiling. It’s fluffy and symmetrical and it smells like a tree is supposed to smell. Wait, what’s that one, her bud says, pointing to a slightly taller one right behind it. She gasps, in a good way.
That one’s one-ninety, the tree guy says.
C’mon, her bud says. Can’t you do one-fifty? Look how happy she is. We have a deal, and tree guy throws in free delivery.
The wife makes ornaments. She makes ornaments for her bud and his kids (he in fact has two) and his kid’s boyfriend too, embroidered with everyone’s names. They decorate, they sing Mariah Carey’s Christmas song nine hundred times, they dance, they laugh. They have a holiday party for the rest of their old friends and when her bud tells the story of the tree, it’s longer than this version, and much funnier, and one of the $800 trees they looked at becomes a reverse hybrid blue spruce. They’re in a holiday movie.
The wife goes bananas shopping for the kid and even for the kid’s boyfriend. The kid is an eighteen-year-old girl. She wants Jackie’s wardrobe from That ’70s Show. The wife lived That ’70s Show. She is going to get the kid all the seventies things. She will get the kid’s dad something good as well. Christmas morning, or in this universe, Christmas one p.m. after bagels and iced espresso, on the floor under the giant tree with the dad and the kid, seeing the kid open all the seventies things is every bit of the joy she imagined it would be.
She goes to Iowa after this, back to her family’s home, and there’s laughter and it’s good. They go to Walmart because that’s what’s there to do, and it isn’t until she gets to Walmart looking for last-minute stocking stuffers that she becomes sad. She has bought no presents for the husband. It isn’t like she’d have even gone to Walmart shopping for her husband, but packages of white men’s t-shirts at Walmart jump off the wall and cuff her in the throat.