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“Well, maybe this is it,” I find myself thinking disconsolately: “the year without a Yule tree.”

It's my first time at an urban tree lot. Thoroughly disheartened, I wander the rows of overpriced green cones. Clearly, there's nothing here for me.

For years, we'd drive up North to the Fawn Lake tree farm. Twenty-three bucks and cut your own, no frills. Make your offering and take your pick.

But unshaven old Jake is retired now and so here I am, feeling like Charlie Brown. These trees have all been groomed to within an inch of their lives: perfect cones, Platonic ideals of “Yule tree”, branches so thick that I have to wonder: Where do you put the ornaments? Some have even—I can scarcely believe my eyes—been spray-painted green.

Not to mention the price. Ten bucks a foot, ye gods. $140 buys a lot of groceries.

Every year I remind myself: this is a choice. Every year I remind myself: it will still be Yule without it.

Every year I do it anyway. If this is what's on offer, though....

Then, out back by the dumpster, I finally find what I'm looking for.

Och, it's the same every year.

The Yule house-cleaning, though not finished, is well under way. The gifts, though yet to be wrapped and sent off, are all bought. Now arises the prospect of the next job-lot of work, and the annual question: to Tree, or not to Tree?

Every year, I remind myself: this is a choice.

Every year, I remind myself: it will still be Yule without it.

And every year—so far, at least—I do it anyway.

Oh, the Yule Tree: that indoor Yggdrasil, that heart and axis of the season, that island of light and color in a bleak white winter sea.

Long ago, I settled in my own mind the ethics of the matter: these, after all, are farmed trees, born for this sacrifice. (Still, though, I try each year to see at least one tree planted in recompense: the traditional life for a life.) Cutting the tree, I make the wonted prayers and offerings.

Oh, but the work involved.

Decking is the least of the matter. That's a joy, seeing again after nearly a year the old well-loved treasures, some of which have been in the family for more than a hundred years. (There's not much room in the steamer trunk of an immigrant, but somehow for these they managed to find a place.) Each ornament bears a memory, if not a story. Each ornament is a prayer.

The lights, that's the issue. Putting them on will be the work of several hours, taking them off again the same, with the added prickly discomfort attending the fact that invariably I leave the Tree up too long. Is it really, I ask myself, worth all the work?

Then there's the expense. Trees hereabouts this year are running $10 a foot. Seven or eight foot's-worth of Yule tree could buy a lot of groceries.

The “Luck of the Tree” they call it. You know the one that I mean: first ornament on, last off, the sine qua non. The luck of the tree.

I don't know what the Luck of your tree looks like, but for years—decades—mine was a clear glass bubble, big as two cupped hands held together, fingertip to fingertip.

That was the Big Luck. The Little Luck was the same but smaller, smaller than a balled fist. One for the front, one for the back of the tree: together, the luck that you see, and the luck that you don't.

Together, the two were the most beautiful ornaments on the Tree. Clear, they caught all the lights. Reflecting, each held the Tree within itself. I suppose that's what made them the Lucks.

Luck is fragile. Two Yules ago, the Big Luck broke. During the decking, a Sun fell from an upper branch and ricocheted off the Luck. The falling ornament survived; the Luck did not. Cleaning up shards, I told myself it wasn't necessarily an omen.

Well, the Tree's up.

(“The Tree,” we say, no further modifiers needed: that certainly tells you something.)

It's an island of light in a sea of darkness, of color in a sea of white. Bedecked with fruits and vegetables—a lifetime's gathering—it's an island of fertility in a sea of fallow.

Behold, a migratory flock of Suns has settled among its branches. Every ornament's a prayer.

Oh, it's always too much work, the Tree. Every year I curse at the lights as I painstakingly wind them, spiral-wise, around the branches. Every year, I tell myself: You don't have to do this. Every year I remind myself: It will still be Yule without it.

Every year, I find myself doing it nonetheless. Every year, I'm glad of it.

The Tree is a sacrifice. Sacrifice bears prayer.

Pagan Nativity

Among the Kalasha of the Hindu Kush,

who alone among Indo-Aryan peoples

still hold to their old pre-Vedic religion,

all expectant women give birth

in the bashali, the house of blood. There

(as always until Enlightenment

doctors, pleading ease of access,

laid them out on their backs)

they squat to push, with gravity

to pull, bracing their labor against

the building's central column:

axis mundi, the typical Tree of Life.

Just so Leto clutched the bole

of a palm tree, bearing Apollo

and Artemis. Even Maryam

the virgin (in Sura xix) brought

forth Isa embracing the self-same

date-palm. Now in these days

of darkness, under the usual

tree of stars, how many

straining mothers crouch

I don't know if you have this thede (custom) where you come from, but around here the first ornament on the Yule Tree—after the lights and star, of course—is the Luck.

First ornament on, last ornament off. That's the Luck o' the Tree.

I don't suppose that there's any particular form that a Luck has to take, but here at my house it's a huge, clear glass bubble, big as your two fists held together. (Being the largest ornament on the Tree, it makes good aesthetic sense that it should be the first to be placed, as well.) After a lifetime of collecting, there are many rare and beautiful ornaments on my tree, but the plain, unadorned Luck is always the most beautiful of them all: in it the lights of the Tree, and in fact the whole Tree itself, are reflected (upside-down, of course). It's the whole Tree in little, the World-Tree in small. I suppose that's what makes it the Luck.

Last year, while decking the tree, I heard something bounce, and land. An ornament from one of the upper branches had slipped its twig and fallen onto the hearthstone. Fortunately, it hadn't broken when it landed. Whew, I thought.

It wasn't until I crunched glass underfoot that I realized what had happened. In its fall, the ornament had bounced off of the Luck and—gods, what an omen—broken it.

No wonder 2020 turned out the way it did.

Heartsick, wondering what the omen meant, I turned to take down the Luck. As I did so, I realized that, though the accident had broken out a section of the glass bubble's surface, the Luck itself was still largely intact. From a few steps away, you couldn't even tell that it had been broken.

I left it up for the remainder of the season, and it was the last ornament off the Tree, as usual.