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The angel on top of our tree has a chipped wing. She has had it since before my children were born, since a Christmas when my husband’s mother handed her to me wrapped in a dish towel and said the tree topper from her own childhood home needed a new house. I still put her up every year, chip and all, and I still climb the same wobbly step stool to do it myself rather than let anyone else near her.
Christmas morning in this house has a shape to it that has not changed much in thirty years, even as the people in the rooms have grown up, moved out, and come back with children of their own.
The kitchen wakes up first
I am always the first one awake, and the first thing I do is not open a single present. I go to the kitchen and start the coffee, and I put a pan of cinnamon rolls in the oven that I mixed and shaped the night before, so that by the time anyone else stirs the whole downstairs smells like it. My mother-in-law used to do the same thing with a coffee cake, and I switched to cinnamon rolls only because my youngest asked for them one year and it stuck.
The living room stays dark until everyone is up. I do not turn the tree lights on until there is at least one other person awake to see them, which means some mornings I sit in the kitchen for twenty minutes with my coffee, waiting, listening for footsteps on the stairs.
The order things happen in
We open stockings before anything under the tree. That is not negotiable in this house and never has been. The stockings themselves are older than most of what is in them, hand knit by my grandmother in a wool that has gone slightly gray with age, and they hang from cup hooks I screwed into the mantel edge myself one December when the plastic stocking holders kept sliding off.
Only after the stockings are empty do we move to the tree. My husband hands out the gifts one at a time, reading names off the tags out loud, which means the whole thing takes twice as long as it would if everyone just tore into their own pile, and I would not have it any other way. It gives the morning a rhythm instead of a rush.
A morning with no order to it feels like any other morning. The order is what makes it Christmas.
What the house looks like by midday
By late morning the living room floor is covered in paper, and I let it sit there through breakfast rather than clearing it away the moment the last gift is opened. There is a photograph from years ago of my children sitting in a pile of wrapping paper eating cinnamon rolls off paper plates, and I think about that photograph every year when I resist the urge to tidy up too soon.
The dining room gets set for a midday meal, simpler than Thanksgiving, usually a ham rather than anything that needs much tending, because I do not want to spend Christmas Day standing at the stove while everyone else is in the next room.
The quiet after
By late afternoon the energy of the morning has worn off. The paper gets gathered into trash bags. The new toys or sweaters or books get carried up to bedrooms. Someone usually falls asleep on the couch, and for years that someone was my husband, and now it is just as likely to be one of my grown children, worn out from the drive in or from a toddler of their own who was up too early.
The angel stays lit until we go to bed that night. I am always the one who unplugs the tree, last thing before I turn in, and I always look at her chipped wing for a second before I do.
Taking it all down eventually
The tree does not come down on Christmas night, or even the next day. It stays up until early January in my house, long enough that by the time it comes down the pine needles have started dropping onto the rug no matter how much water I have kept in the stand. Taking the ornaments off is its own quiet task, done alone most years, each one wrapped back in its own square of tissue paper before it goes into the same boxes it came out of eleven months earlier.
The angel goes into her own box, still wrapped in the same dish towel my mother-in-law used decades ago. I have never replaced that towel either. Some things get to stay exactly as they were handed to you, even after the wing has been chipped for longer than it was ever whole.
