all the pretty little blue lights

My mom had called me almost two weeks ago to tell me she had already started putting up the Christmas decorations. It was not like her to start so early.

Even tonight, as she hovered around the table cleaning up and preparing coffee and listening to my father and I talking the usual talk, I could tell she was eager to get to the tree. This morning we had all awoken to our first snowfall; a gentle blanket of white covering everything and sticking to nothing. It's not like her demand was out of season. Still. "I don't know why I'm so determined this year," she repeated. "Maybe it's a bad omen. Maybe something bad is going to happen."

The words just kind of hung in the air for a second. My father gave her the "I knew you were going to say that" glance (and then the line) and I just stared at my milky espresso and said nothing. I had heard her speaking with my Aunt over the phone. We were all quite capable of filling in the blanks.

So we went into the living room and got to work. My father disappeared downstairs. My grandmother sat on the couch and watched, perfectly content to stay out of the decision making process. Not that there is every any creative fireworks between the two of us. I credit my mom for my sense of aesthetic - her words, not mine. Time is no object when working on any thing of beauty. We worked on the tree for a solid two hours, tucking every last blue and white light bulb into those fake pine branches while Elvis sang "Love me tender" in the background. Every now and then I caught us both humming the same words and realized I can't remember ever singing a song with her - not wholeheartedly, anyhow. And every ten minutes or so my grandmother would look at us and smile and ask me when I was going to put up my tree. And I would tell her I usually waited until around mid December because Amy and I preferred a real tree and I wanted it to last until at least mid January.

And every now and then I would kill the lights to see how the tree was looking. And it was more and more beautiful every time. The way those white and blue lights reflected in every pane of the bay window - well, it made the street where I grew up seem even more magical. My mom kept saying how peaceful it all looked; and how happy it would make my grandmother to just sit there and stare at it, the way she often did with the window. If there would be no one passing by on a cold suburban night, at least she wouldn't be able to complain there was no life and no view.

And so there was no more talk of bad omens. At least not for one night.