When my cousins and I were young, we built a makeshift Christmas tree in our grandma’s basement garage. Christmas was a relatively new celebration for our family: my parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles had arrived in Australia as refugees from Vietnam in the late 1970s and, as Buddhists, didn’t celebrate Christmas – until young children came along.
So, our tree was fashioned out of cardboard tubes – the kind that hold bolts of fabric, since our family was in the textiles business. The base was a plastic bucket; the body was three of those slender cardboard cylinders, tipi-ed together and tied at the top. We draped it in tinsel and crowned it with a star. It was a thing of beauty, one-and-a-half metres high with a slightly musty aroma.
One December evening, the ersatz tree was the centrepiece for our Christmas “photo booth”. A cousin was delegated the role of Santa. Another was an elf. We took turns posing with our festive tableau. When it was time to go home, we left the tree intact for another day of play and switched off the lights.
A few days later, we found out the Christmas tree had been urgently dismantled. One evening, Bà Nội – my paternal grandmother – had walked into the basement and got the shock of her life. She was momentarily convinced, thanks to the tinsel twinkling in the dark, that the Christmas tree was Buddha himself – and that she had died and passed into the afterlife.
My cousins and I laughed hysterically when we heard the news – not so much at the thought of an elderly woman mistaking a western cultural symbol for an eastern deity, but more at the preposterousness that she could ever die. To us, grandma, the family matriarch, seemed immortal.
But she did die, a good 20 years or so after that cardboard Christmas, at 99. The elf, by then a palliative care doctor, played a critical role in her care in her final weeks of life. Last year, we marked our first Christmas in her home without her presence.
In the Sydney apartment where I live with my husband and two‑year-old, we don’t have a Christmas tree. My husband and I are not big Christmas people, but this might change when our daughter starts making inquiries about Santa, Rudolph and no doubt our missing tree. Should I feel the urge to make our own, I know where to find the cardboard and tinsel we need.
English (US)