Nov 29, 2024 4 min read

The closest I’ve ever come to being felled by an asthma attack was because of a Christmas tree. My son was a baby, and he and I went to visit the family next door. We admired their beautiful, live tree so bedecked with golden ornaments and lights.

“Smells like Christmas in here,” I said as the piney green fragrance wafted around the room. It didn’t take long for me to notice that I was wheezing a bit, but.

That “but” will get you. I was wheezing, but we were having fun. The neighbor kids were playing with my son. By the time I noticed it was getting hard to breathe, it was almost too late. (I hadn’t taken my rescue inhaler with me.)

Foolishly thinking I could make it home, I bundled up my son and headed the 40 yards or so across the yard. Each step became harder, like walking in quicksand. By the time I was at my front steps I was gasping for air and unable to hold my son. I put him down and staggered into the kitchen where I rummaged through my purse for the inhaler.

Feeling stupid but finally breathing again, I made some mental notes about never leaving home without an inhaler. And then this:

I am allergic to evergreens, and must never have a live tree in my house. It was a sad holiday reckoning, like the one that arrives when your children grow out of Santa Claus. My own childhood Christmases smelled of pine needles and sap. Our trees were festooned with those icicle streamers we tossed at the branches. If not for our very tall dad, the top half of the tree would have been naked.

Somewhere around Jan. 6, we’d all grow weary of the holiday clutter and would be dispatched to remove our toys and other gifts to our bedrooms. And by then the tree had started to declutter itself, dropping needles into the carpet.

Sometime today or tomorrow, I will go upstairs to the storage closet and pull out my Christmas tree, a pre-lit artificial tree about the height of a first-grader. I’ll put it on a table and cover its stand with a red blanket. I’ll drag out the box of ornaments: the nativity scene, the sculpture of Santa driving a sleigh pulled by a cow, the fake garland I weave around the dining room chandelier, and the ornaments – 20 years’ worth of baseball players and ballerinas and fishing poles and pianos and all the things I bought to mark my kids’ activities and interests. To unwrap a little snowboard or pair of pink ceramic toe shoes is to unleash a monsoon of nostalgic torment because – well, you know.

“Cute tree,” my son said when he was home last year. I might have taken that word “cute” as dismissive, but the kid is not like that. The tree is cute, standing there in the corner like my sheltie Smoothie used to do, waiting for someone to come round and notice.

Every year I see live, potted Christmas trees for sale. Occasionally I’ll stand there in the aisle and ponder one of them, wondering if it might be time to return to the warm, green fragrance of my youth. And then I remember that awful walk across the yard that night, the wheezing and the fear.

Now, I’m never more than a few feet from a rescue inhaler, but I stay far away from live Christmas trees. My tree may be little and fake, but it still holds our stories, and those are real.