A couple of months after I started dating the woman I’d eventually marry, I took her to meet my family. It was 220 miles from Alix’s place in Columbia, South Carolina, to my mama’s house in little Sterling, Georgia. It took me 215 miles to muster the courage to make a confession.
I took a deep breath.
“I need to tell you something,” I said. “My mom likes to decorate for the holidays.”
“Great!” Alix replied. “You don’t understand,” I said. “She really likes to decorate for the holidays.”
We soon pulled into her front yard. It was early fall, but plastic Easter eggs the size of watermelons hung from the pecan tree. White plywood reindeer grazed by the azaleas. Two ceramic jacko’-lanterns bracketed the porch steps. My mom loved the jack-o’-lanterns because, after Halloween, she could turn them so that the back sides faced out and presto—Thanksgiving pumpkins.
Every holiday, everywhere, all at once.
But it wasn’t until a few years later, when she moved to Jesup to be near her daughter and son-in-law, that Virginia Tomlinson came up with her greatest creation: the eternal Christmas tree.
We always had an artificial tree. When I was a kid, it was a Sears Roebuck model with color-coded paint swatches to help you stick the limbs into the right part of the pole. In her later years, she switched to a Walmart version. (She dreaded going to Walmart until she figured out she could beat the crowds by checking out in the garden section.)
That first Christmas in her new place, she put up the tree in the corner of her living room. It never left.
It wasn’t always Christmas in the corner, but it was always some holiday. She hung shamrocks on the tree for Saint Patrick’s Day. Plastic lilies for Easter. Little American flags for Memorial Day and July 4. Whatever was up stayed up until the next holiday. There was always something to celebrate.
My mama worked from the day she could walk. She grew up in a sharecropping family, picking cotton on land somebody else owned. She took over the household when she was twelve and her mama got sick. Every day, while still a child, she baked three pans of biscuits, made a pot of beans, washed all the clothes, and spent every spare hour in the fields. When she finally got old enough to leave, she worked factory jobs. She spent the last eighteen years of her working life as a waitress.
There was many a holiday she had to pack frozen shrimp on the assembly line, or fetch coffee for cranky travelers. So when her time was finally her own, she squeezed every drop of joy out of every holiday that existed.
The more efficient-minded among you like to get your Christmas tree to the curb on December 26, or at least the first day the yard waste crew comes by. Others were brought up believing that it’s bad luck to keep your tree up after Twelfth Night, the fifth of January. That’s the night before Epiphany, the celebration of the arrival of the wise men who brought their gifts to the baby Jesus.
It’s a lovely tradition. But along the way, my mom had her own epiphany: Keep your Christmas tree up as long as you damn well please. Don’t pay attention to tradition or the calendar. Sometimes the best way to get through this life is to make every day a holiday.
Tommy Tomlinson is the author of the books Dogland and The Elephant in the Room. He writes a newsletter called The Writing Shed and hosts the podcast Southbound through WFAE, the NPR station in Charlotte. He grew up in Brunswick, Georgia, and lives in Charlotte with his wife, Alix Felsing; her mother, Joann; and a cat named Jack Reacher.
