Going completely off-topic

by Rick Blechta

Yeah, yeah, I know this blog is supposed to be about presenting thoughts about writing, crime writing in particular, but like Aline yesterday, I can’t think of anything particularly interesting to post about writing or reading or publishing or…

So I’m going to go off on a tangent — not like I didn’t also do that last week! My post has zero to do with the Type M “mandate”, but, well, I won’t apologize.

What is it with people’s Christmas trees this year (at least in the city of Toronto)???

The past two evenings, my wife and I have been out and about in the city in which we live, and of course, we look at people’s Christmas lights. Quite often, there’s a Christmas tree in their front window, too. The outside lights are generally very colourful, but it didn’t take long to notice that there’s something quite odd going on inside those houses.

The vast majority of trees we’re seeing — and I’ll get to numbers in a moment — are decorated with white lights. That’s it. Whether the tree is real or not is immaterial. There’s just this mono-colour decor thing going on.

So let’s get to the numbers. Last night, driving back from a band rehearsal (a rather long trip on smaller residential streets) we observed a total of 28 Christmas trees in people’s front windows. Of that number, 25 had white lights only, another had those light blue lights and only 2 had multiple colours. I don’t know what the numbers were last year, but I’ll bet it hadn’t swung this far or we would have noticed — which we did immediately this year.

Here’s another thing: none of the trees had any Christmas ornaments! I’m only talking for us here, but one of the joys of the holiday season is to take out our much-loved ornaments to adorn our tree. Many were bought in faraway places (Scotland, Vienna, Florence, Paris, etc.) or to celebrate the birth of children and grandchildren.

We still have three of the four my wife and I bought for our first tree together so many years ago now. All we had money for was 4 good Christmas tree ornaments. The rest of the tree’s decorations consisted of a dozen cheap, red glass balls, strings of popcorn and cranberries, red and green braided yarn and some pine cones I picked up under the trees at the nearby mall and decorated with glued-on sparkles. To us they are precious objects with many memories wrapped around them. All of our decorations are like that.

So why have Christmas trees descended into becoming mere fashion accessories? Did we miss some important news that all trees were to be white lights only? Did some fashion gurus mandate away our sort of decorations? What’s going on? Keep in mind that it’s been proven in bad economic times people tend to put up more outdoor lights rather than fewer. Does tree decorating have an underlying meaning?

Then I had a rather sad thought. What if this trend is indicative of the rapidly changing world in which we’re living? As society becomes more fractured and insular — and, well, colder, is this being reflected in the way we think of our Christmas trees, that they’re just an after-thought decoration but up mostly because “we should have a Christmas tree” rather than a link to our families and our past. Even our two thirty-something sons, hardened characters that they can be get all dewy-eyed when they spot special decorations they loved from their childhood and they still take delight in moving the other’s “First Christmas” decoration to a spot against the wall, while putting theirs in a place of pride right at the front (this happens several times as they come and go from our house).

Is the 2016 Toronto Christmas tree something that’s only happening here, or is it more widespread? I sure hope not!

And if it is widespread, is there a deeper meaning?