We’re lucky for every Christmas with those we love

Whether you’re still trying to get your Christmas tree up or you’ve had it up since Halloween, it’s okay.

If it’s a real tree, an aluminum white 2-footer sitting on a tabletop, or a Christmas cactus, that’s okay too.

I love Christmas and I love my family’s Christmas traditions. But that’s because they’re steeped in my memories, ringed by love, laughter, and the more than occasional drama that comes over the years.

Sometimes it’s our given family and sometimes it’s our chosen family, but either way, this time of the year makes me grateful for all of the people I have in my life to love and be loved by.

It also makes me stop and think how lucky I am to be able to share these memories, and for every Christmas when everyone I love is able to gather in whatever way to share this time together.

It includes the December family Christmas I spent in a parking lot in Arkansas as a teenager, laughing with my cousins and siblings despite the frigid temperatures and the disruptions that had brought us out of my grandparents’ warm dining room to the place we had gathered.

There was the year in junior high when my father and I played Santa and got so excited, we woke my younger brother and sister up at 5 a.m. Christmas morning to open presents and by 8 a.m., everyone was ready to go back to bed. It’s something I’m sure my mother warned us about, even though I don’t remember that part now.

The Christmas I spent with my family in my attic apartment in Cape Girardeau is also captured like a snapshot in my mind. I was in college and my younger brother was about 14. He was handing out presents when the Christmas tree fell over on him and he had to wait for everyone to stop laughing before he could be rescued. I’m not even mentioning how long it took us that year to get the tree down after the holidays.

Not that long ago, my middle nephew was small enough to sit on my shoulders and put the star on top of the tree at my house in Poplar Bluff. He’s 12 now and I can’t even pick the kid up anymore. He’s the same nephew who put our bells “in time out” so they “had to be quiet” the year I took him to Walmart to ring for the Salvation Army. I thought he’d love all the noise, but had to bribe him with gummy worms to get through the next hour.

I have a photo from last year of my youngest nephew Liam, who was almost 3, looking up at my tree and saying “so tall.”

And this year, my tree went up in its normal spot, not too long after Thanksgiving, and was decked out with the faded pair of well-loved ornaments that came from my great-grandparents. There’s the little gold baby in a cradle I got the year I was born, the Santa Clause my brother made in elementary school, and the green construction paper leaf garland my oldest nephew made one year with my mother. There is also the ornament from the year my youngest nephew was born and the ornaments my childhood best friend gave me this year from her current home in Texas.

It warms even the chilliest of December days just by being there.

(And don’t tell my brother, but my Scotch pine seems to have a little bit of lean to this year, but I swear that’s just the way the trunk grew and it’s perfectly safe.)

Donna Farley is the editor of the Daily American Republic. She can be reached at dfarley.dar@gmail.com.