After I took down the Christmas tree this year, I stood over the kitchen trash can, emptying the tree’s needles from the pockets of my sweatshirt.
They had fallen into the pockets, into my hair, into my shoes. Every time I reached into the tree to unhook an ornament, I heard a soft cascade, swishing through the branches and pattering onto the floor.
The tree came down well before Epiphany this year, mostly because of the dropping needles. It started dropping needles as soon as we brought it home and set it up; truth be told, it was dropping more needles than I liked at the Christmas tree lot. But so were all the other trees there. Maybe conditions were poor last summer at the tree farm.
And it was taking water, right up until the day we took it down, and it was a beautiful tree. Just one determined to spread its needles far and wide.
Once the tree was carried out and the ornaments packed away until next winter, and once we had used three vacuum cleaners to remove as many of the needles as possible (shop vac for most of them, regular vacuum to get the ones embedded in the carpet, held for the crevices of upholstered furniture), it was time to turn out my pockets.
Within a minute of doing that, I spied another needle on the windowsill, a second on the carpet up against the edge of the bookcase. I expect — I know from experience — that I’ll be finding Christmas tree needles for weeks, probably months.
That’s OK, though. Because once the work of taking the tree down is done, the needles are less an annoyance and more a reminder of the tree, how pretty it was, how it lit up the living room on Christmas Eve night when all the kids were home and we celebrated the greatest gift.
Yes, even when a needle gets stuck in my sock and pokes at the bottom of my foot.
I wouldn’t say we chose a real tree because we want the needles it leaves behind; we like the fragrance, and the way it looks, and somehow, plastic doesn’t convey the message of life persisting through the dark and cold winter until spring comes again in quite the same way.
Even if, as my children have reminded me, a cut-down tree is already dead. Never mind, I say. At least it will decompose into compounds good for the earth, and support new life that way.
The needles that remain are the reminders that all living things leave behind, the detritus of a life that, like all of creation, was and is loved by its Creator. We all leave such reminders, especially visible to our loved ones: the ceramic bird that belonged to my aunt, the bedspread that belonged to my grandmother, the rosebush that my mother-in-law loved, the furnace filters that my husband changes, recalling his father telling him how to do it each and every time.
Those whom we love live on in our memories, and we will live on in the memories of those who love us.