The Year the Tree Fell – an essay by Corinne Cordasco-Pak

The Year The Tree Fell

by Corinne Cordasco-Pak

I was in bed when the Christmas tree fell over. The crash from the other room startled me awake—a heavy thump, shattering glass—and I was on my feet and in the hallway. When I emerged into the living room, I found the tree horizontal, its colored lights twinkling merrily. Broken ornaments strewn across the carpet still sparkled as brightly in the light as they had on the tree. Taking it all in, I began to cry.

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I have always loved Christmas, but it has always made me sad. Growing up, I cried every year on Christmas night, knowing that the celebration would soon be over. In the jubilant weeks leading up to Christmas, I could pretend that the celebration would never end. All year long, I looked forward to my family’s holiday traditions. At Christmas, there was endless excitement: cookies to bake, music to play, gifts to wrap, parties to attend. Most important of all, we celebrated the “true meaning of Christmas”: the birth of Jesus.

Growing up in an Evangelical Christian family, there was no separating Christ from Christmas. All year, our lives were arranged around the routines of religious life—church, Bible studies, prayers—but at Christmastime, the whole world was celebrating along with us. Back then, I felt grateful to have been born into a family that taught me (what I understood to be) the capital-T Truth. We made a conscious effort not to lose sight of the religious context at the core of the celebration. Our holiday routines included advent calendars—the kind with candles representing the four Sundays of Advent—and carol-singing at Church. My mother bought pins that said “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” and replied “Merry Christmas” to store clerks that wished her “Happy Holidays.” Among Santas and stockings, our family set up crèches, or nativity scenes, including a lighted one in the front yard. There were living nativities too, performed outside of the church for passing cars. My youth group would portray the Holy Family, shepherds, and wisemen. During the years we attended a church where my grandfather was the pastor, I always played the Virgin Mary, loving the chance to be at the center of the festivities.

At home, starting from the time I was seven or eight, I loved to set up the nativity. Every year, when we unpacked my family’s well-loved porcelain crèche, I found the perfect spot for it and arranged it gently, though many of the figurines were chipped from years of display. I started with baby Jesus in his manger, then added Mary and Joseph, hovering near. I arranged the wise men and shepherds and barn animals at a respectful distance, all angled towards the baby. I hummed “Silent Night” as I adjusted the figures until they were perfect. 

In a house full of tinsel and lights, the task felt quiet, meditative, and holy. I wondered if the sadness I sometimes felt was an indication that I was losing sight of the true meaning of Christmas: maybe I needed to pray more to strengthen my faith. I chased the feeling I got when I set up the nativity, hoping that focusing on something meaningful would keep the sadness at bay. 

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In my early 20s, I began to collect my own Christmas decorations. I bought a mini tree for my small apartment and trimmed it with baby’s breath and thrifted costume jewelry. With the addition of a string of white lights, the humble little tree twinkled cozily. A few years later, when I bought my first house, I had room for a larger tree, but little money to spend on decorating it. I cut paper chains and folded origami ornaments out of Trader Joe’s bags and hung my old strings of lights. The same year, my Great Aunt June—one of my grandmother’s four older sisters and a bonus grandmother to me—was no longer able to live independently and offered me her Christmas decorations. I didn’t know exactly what her collection included, but I accepted gladly. In the first box, I found kitschy figurines—a sparkly snowman, a Precious Moments cherub— but he second box held treasure: a few dozen gorgeous mid-century ornaments. They weren’t West Elm reproductions, or generic baubles, but brightly colored space-age domes and glass clusters, authentic and well cared for. I handled them gently, examining each one as I hung them high on the tree—both to show them off, and to protect them from damage.

The third and final box contained a crèche, even more elaborate than my parents’, as well as a wooden stable. I decided that it would look perfect underneath the tree, its greenery sheltering the figurines. From then on, every year, I arranged the nativity beneath the tree.

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On the night the tree fell, I cried as I gathered broken decorations and put anything we could salvage back on the tree. Unlike just days earlier, when my husband and I’d played holiday songs as we found the perfect spot for each ornament, this was not a festive moment. The branches, once soft, had already grown scratchier. Instead of unpacking ornaments from organized boxes, we gathered the undamaged ornaments from the floor. Every time I discovered the pieces of another broken ornament flung into the corners of the room, I cried harder. 

Though many of my Aunt June’s ornaments were destroyed, her nativity was unscathed. It was not a Christmas miracle—the religious iconography protected while the secular was destroyed—because the crèche wasn’t under the tree. It was safe in my basement, still in its box.

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That fall, a few months earlier, I’d realized that I no longer believed in God. In my final months of belief, my identity as Christian began to feel constrictive and wrong. I felt disconnected from the people who I had thought shared my values, and baffled that we could interpret our spirituality in such disparate ways. For years, I’d held onto my faith despite situations that caused me to question it, including several years at a Christian college rife with hypocrisy and abuse, a political climate in which “Christian” had come to mean “far right Republican”, and an overdue examination of values I’d been raised on, things like purity culture and total depravity. I explored different denominations—a near conversion to Catholicism, research on Quaker meetings, and several years of considering myself a “Christian mystic.” Even when I stopped attending church regularly, I’d continued to pray, read scripture, and study theology. I was afraid to let go of the faith that had been such a huge part of my life, so I tried to find something that would allow me to hold on to it, in whatever altered form it took until, one day, I reached for my faith and found it gone. 

It hadn’t seemed so hard then, that fall, to let belief slip away. In fact, I’d felt only relief as I let go of something that was causing me pain. In fall, a season of transitions, I was in good company: the trees dropped their leaves, plants shed petals, and I let go of Christianity. I had forgotten about winter, the time of year for rooting down and embracing tradition. In the same way that I relied on many of my Christmas traditions to bring comfort during dreary days and long nights—steaming mugs of cocoa and baked goods, twinkling lights, flickering clove-scented candles—my faith had brought me comfort when I faced hurt, loneliness, or loss. 

That year, as it came time to decorate for Christmas, faith was the last thing on my mind as I cheerfully unspooled lights and hung ornaments—but when I opened the blue plastic tub of Aunt June’s decorations to find the treasured crèche, I stopped. This treasured family heirloom, an emblem of the belief at the heart of Christmas festivities, was loaded with meaning.

Until that moment, I had felt at peace with my waning faith, the sight of the nativity revealed a deep, underlying grief. It didn’t feel genuine to display a scene from a faith that I had rejected, but it was still a gift from someone I loved. I was reminded of the duet from the snowy second act of the opera La Bohème, sung by two lovers who have recently parted but decide to stay together just until springtime. In the dead of winter, they cannot bear to give each other up, though the situation is dire; in the end, their reluctance leads to the permanent parting of death. In contrast, my choice to leave the nativity scene in storage that year would become the lesser of two griefs, likely sparing them from destruction on the night that the tree fell.

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The next morning, I considered the empty space under the tree where the nativity had always stood and wanted to fill it. I wanted the kind of resolution that happened in movies like Home Alone or The Family Stone, where all conflict and doubt magically resolves on Christmas. I wanted my own movie-perfect Christmas morning, complete with a happy family in a beautiful house with a toy train circling the base of the tree. 

 I knew that my grief wouldn’t be resolved by redecorating, but the idea of a toy train under the tree comforted me. I could look forward to assembling the track each year, and with its battery-powered engine, it would move always forward, an optimistic gesture for the years to come. I bought a secondhand train online and found, when it arrived, that it was as well-loved as my family’s crèche—some of the tracks were broken, as was the button that was supposed to play a recorded whistle—but I didn’t care. The red engine pulled four cars and a jolly caboose.

I set it up beneath the tree and smiled as it chugged in circles. My grief was still there—I couldn’t unbreak ornaments or will myself into belief—but the train gave me the feeling that I’d chased every year since I was a child. The battered little toy, enjoyed for years by some other family before it came to me, became the mascot for a new kind of Christmas. Each night, I turned the train on for a few hours, letting it circle the track under the glow of the tree. 

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I still don’t know why the tree fell. My theory is that the weight of the tree, the lights, the decorations just became too much for our old plastic stand. Whatever the cause, I will remember that night as the night that something happened that wouldn’t have happened without my loss of faith and the falling tree, something hopeful and expansive. Crying for broken ornaments, I was able to grieve a less visible loss, and recognize that I could choose how to fill the empty spaces in my life. 

When I unpack the train this year, next year, and the year after that, I will always remember the hole it filled that first Christmas. Though the holiday may not mean to me what it once did, it isn’t meaningless; there is endless meaning yet to be discovered—new decorations and traditions to replace—or join—old favorites. Maybe there will even be a day when I set up both the train and the nativity scene. The crèche still carries memories of treasured family—my Great Aunt June passed away several years ago—and, a mother now, I have new reverence for the scene of Mary and her son in the afterglow of birth. Regardless of what I do or don’t believe, when I open the box that contains the Christmas train each year, I will be reminded that even though there may always be sadness at Christmas, there is also joy waiting to be discovered in places as unassuming as an old plastic train, circling a battered tree on broken tracks.

Corinne Cordasco-Pak (she/her) received her MFA from Randolph College, where she was the fiction editor for Revolute. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Write or Die, Oyster River Pages, Identity Theory, and Near Window and she has received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. Corinne is a member of the Wildcat Writing Group and lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, toddler, and their two rescue dogs. You can find her online @CECordasco