Christmas Tree

Over the years, Mrs Vache Folle and I gradually pared down the amount of stuff we do for Christmas. For many people, the business of decorating, entertaining, gift giving, and the like can become overwhelming and can make the holiday season more full of stress than joy.

We avoided holiday stress by cutting out some of the factors that lead to anxiety. After all, we reasoned, we have no children, and our dogs don't know it's Christmas, so why bother decorating the house as we used to do? We cut this out with no ill effect. Then the Christmas tree began to smack of expense and effort, and we decided to decorate the ficus plant instead. Finally, we stopped doing even that. We quit travelling during the holidays so as to avoid traffic and other winter travel anxieties.

We cut out the big holiday meal as well and started celebrating a "Jewish Christmas" by going to the movies and eating at a Chinese or Japanese restaurant. This we have done for the last five years, and we plan to continue the tradition.

Gift giving has gotten simpler. We convinced our families to eschew the exchange of gifts among adults and to limit gifts to children. As the children have grown, they have come to prefer gift cards and to select their own gifts, and this is even easier! Mrs Vache Folle and I exchange only token gifts with one another, and this has made shopping for gifts more fun.

We do not entertain at Christmas. We found that we were competing with so many other events, that adding another party to the mix might actually just piss people off. We each have our annual company party, a family party thrown by Mrs Vache Folle's Christmas fanatic mother, at least one friend's party and some church events.

As we cut out various secular observations, we have increased our participation in religious observances of Advent and Christmas. It is a busy time for the choir in which I sing and for the church as a whole, but I find the events at church to be more gratifying and enjoyable than stressful. The holiday is all about God's being with us, and I look forward to the season rather than dreading it.

That said, we decided to try to let a little of the secular trappings to creep back in, albeit with a religious spirit. Last year, we tried to put lights on some little evergreens that line the side of the house and face the drive. This was a monumental pain and a failure due to the massive amounts of snow we had, and we resolved to avoid any exterior illumination. This year, a friend in choir offered us a tree from his tree farm (he keeps it as a hobby), and I took him up on it on a whim. Mrs Vache Folle and I followed him into the forest behind his house and picked out a monster tree (3 meters or so) which he cut down for us. We put it in the part of the house with the vaulted ceiling, and it looks great. We threw on the various lights we had used outside last year, and Madame bought 120 balls on sale at Michael's. It looks great, and we had fun setting it up. I think that the fact that the tree was put up on a lark and that the tree is gratuitous rather than mandatory made it much more enjoyable.