As I consider taking down the tree.

How do our mothers trick us into believing they will live forever?

It’s the rituals, these annual holiday rituals.
It’s the antique pie plate, and the recipes only made for Christmas breakfast. It’s the stockings swinging above the fire, matching red pajamas, and candy canes nestled into cups of cocoa.

So this is what we are doing, as we pin up our Advent calendars and hide trinkets in our New Year’s Eve cakes. We are imprinting ourselves, as mothers, in our children’s hearts. Making them believe not in Santa or in elves, but in the concept of everlasting home.

My mother, my complicated mother, might as well be reincarnated as a Douglas fir, for the way she magically appears, sparkly and commanding, in my living room the last month of every year.

She was no angel, of course. But she loved to dazzle, and so she does.