Of Home & Christmas Traditions

At long last, after managing to squeeze in some time to reorganize our flat, I was able to finally put up our Christmas tree. It looked this bare when I started:


And after toiling on it for two weeknights, it emerged as something looking like this:


I proudly present to you the first Christmas Tree of the de Gracia household :D

To give our home a livelier, Christmasy ambience, we chose the red and gold theme, with some touches of cherubs in their musical instruments. Now here’s a bit of a trivia: this tree was passed on to me by my dear friend Yvonne who inherited the same tree from their neighbor 3 years ago. Since we weren’t here for the holidays last year, I lent this to my cousin Sarj as I hated the idea of this tree being put away and not serve it’s purpose during the year’s much-awaited celebration. So yup, it’s been tossed to so many homes already, and I gotta admit that this tree’s still quite nice looking and sturdier compared to those I’ve seen in Carrefour and Ace. It’s only 4.5 feet tall and accommodated approximately 600 clear rice lights. For me, it’s just about the perfect size.

To be honest, hubby wasn’t too keen about putting up a Christmas tree at home. He thinks it’s gonna eat up space in our little hall even if we had already evicted our favorite item from Ikea in place of a more compact TV rack to hold our entertainment system. But I stood my ground and persisted till his ears bled. I calmly argued that we needed to feel the spirit of Christmas and pretend like we’re really HOME (as in Pinas home). You see, it’s both our first time to spend Christmas away from our families and I personally think we are not coping too well on this decision (more on this in a minute). I think I was able to convince him with my urging, and good thing I did. When I was feeling frantic about finding the right Christmas lights to go with the tree, he was ironically the one who found these nice, pocket friendly-priced sets for our dear tree. In fact, he didn’t mind coming back to the store the following day when I realized we needed more. Good job, honey!

Now it didn’t occur to me that putting up a Christmas Tree can be emotional for someone who’s rather feeling homesick. When I finished putting up the last piece of ornament, I took a step back to admire what I’ve done (given the truth that I did not get any help at all from start to finish). Suddenly out of nowhere, I found myself half consciously nostalgic. I couldn’t help but feel tears well up in my eyes. I blinked and instantly felt hot tears roll down my cheeks. The crybaby in me just whimpered like a kitten. I quietly sobbed and sobbed in a little corner as my mind waded through waves of memories of Christmases with my family.  These were exactly the things I would miss this December. Last year wasn’t really a special Christmas for hubby and I as newlyweds since we were busy planning for the church wedding happening in two days after the 25th, but that was a different scenario. Our families were there, and we had the chance to greet them personally and share the happy spirit of the holidays in between all the wedding preps.

Oh well, at least for sure we know that next year, we will be home again. We will definitely not miss spending our favorite holiday of all with people whom we love and care about. If it’s any consolation, time flies fast anyway, so in a matter of a months, we will be home for Christmas although for 2008. For now, we will focus on beginning with our own Christmas tradition in our 2nd home.