We were his lookouts.
He’d start searching for the right one when the weather got cool, driving around the low-lying woods and swamps where we grew up, Winston Light butts piled in the ashtray. Eventually he’d find an evergreen he thought might fit between the living-room wall and the wood stove, and he’d come home to announce he’d found our Christmas tree.
Then, sometime after Thanksgiving, the four of us would pile into his truck with a handsaw on the floorboard.
My mother, a first-grade teacher and rule-follower who wore Christmas sweaters with an earnest conviction, was somewhat mortified, somewhat worried, but otherwise alive for her carefree husband.
He’d pull onto the shoulder of Route 224 or 6 or any of the other narrow backroads of my childhood, grab the saw, and leave me and my brother with detailed instructions:
1. If a car’s coming, holler.
2. If it’s the sheriff, holler louder.
3. If the sheriff’s car stops, tell them he’s tracking a deer.
4. If they keep asking questions, tell ’em it’s a big deer, the biggest deer you ever saw.
We’d roll down the windows to hear that saw working the trunk, his refrain of “c’mon goddammit” echoing through the trees. Soon he’d emerge with the prettiest, ugliest misdemeanor of a memory. He’d toss it in the truck bed and lurch off, and before anyone noticed, Mom had it dressed with tinsel and candy canes.
I should say that he never took them from a yard, always a dense forest where he probably knew the owner. And I know he wasn’t the only one who chose and cut this way. One year he came home and laughed, “Somebody stole the tree I was gonna steal.”
Sometime around 1990 we got a family camcorder, and in front of that ugly tree we’d dance with our great-uncle George and grandmother, Meemaw, kicking our legs like rural Rockettes. Back then we made videos for us, not to share.
He was teaching us something with those raggedy holiday centerpieces, maybe that the point of it all isn’t perfection but the lasting impression, and maybe that the seasons are made memorable by the characters who shape them.
I’ve spent my career telling stories about those kinds of people, the ones who zig when others zag, who see beauty in an ugly tree. And the older I get, the more I think it might be because I’m trying to understand the original characters who raised me.
This’ll be the 13th holiday season I’ve spent in Charlotte, and I remember the weird moments most. Like when I lived in a fourplex near Central Coffee in 2015 and heard a string of fireworks, then walked outside to find my neighbor — who, by his telling, had spent time in a cult — holding a lighter shouting, “It’s Christmas, bitches!” Or our first Christmas Eve in NoDa, when a neighbor had a firepit going while AC/DC’s “T.N.T” blasted, and he raised a Bud Light to me and said, “Merry Christmas.”
These are my people.
Or the awful-turned-beautiful memory of 2022, when the temperatures crashed to near 0 and our power went out, and my pregnant spouse and I woke up on Christmas morning in a hotel bed with our 2-year-old boy and our dog.
The Charlotte area has its own oddball holiday traditions. McAdenville is a ridiculous concept, when you think about it, but it works. The light balls on Hillside Avenue are fun, but they also raise money for charity. Zoom out to Cherryville, about 40 miles away, and they still shoot muskets on New Year’s Day to ward off evil spirits.
Last night we pulled back into Charlotte from our Thanksgiving beach trip, cocklespurs still clinging to the kids’ pants, and we noticed that most of the leaves in our neighborhood had finally come down. From our porch we could see clear across two or three streets, and we spotted a yard with dozens of lit-up inflatables. We drove the boys past them and they screeched.
Meanwhile, back inside, I found my email full of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, and scrolled through an Instagram feed full of perfect smiles. But the real magic of a holiday shows up when people let themselves be exactly who they are, weird and imperfect and endearing.
My dad didn’t live long enough to meet my boys, but they still know him as Grandpa Fred from his photos, and my 5-year-old asks why he lives so far away.
The last photo I have of him is from his final Christmas in 2018, at a nursing home facility near Shallotte. Doctors had said he wouldn’t live past September, but there he was on December 25, holding a stuffed animal, in what turned out to be his last two weeks on earth. He didn’t say Merry Christmas that year, but when we said it to him, he said, “Same to you.” And he called out a few times for his uncle George and aunt Gertie and his “Mama” — the characters who raised him to be the character who raised me to be whatever I’ll become to the kids in the back seat.
This morning we broke out our holiday decorations. I’ve never thieved a tree, in case you’re wondering. But I showed the kids a few Polaroids of the ones I grew up with. Our oldest laughed and asked what happened to them.
Nothing, I told him. They just grew up to be that way.
