My Advent Tree

The heirloom itself (yes, with purple matryoshkas admiring it)

My very oldest Christmas tradition has quite the story - in fact, it nearly wasn't my oldest Christmas tradition for over a decade.  Thankfully, it has recovered so that in 2013 I may retell its journey.

Some people have those little paper Advent (or beginning of December, with the liturgical discrepancy) calendars which you open every day to mark off the days until Christmas.  In certain cases, the opening involves a piece of candy or Lego set (but what do you do in subsequent years?).  I have a Precious Moments musical Advent tree - a little artificial pine about a foot tall on a square base with 24 tiny numbered drawers, each secreting a miniscule hand-painted ornament.  The idea is that you hang a ornament on the tree every day, during which I wind up the top and it chimes "Joy to the World," my favorite Christmas hymn.

One of my multitudinous shortcomings growing up was my urge to imitate things my favorite picture-book characters did, often expecting the same successful results.  One Christmas Day when I was perhaps three or four, I fell asleep on the late-night car ride back from my uncle and aunt's celebration, and my dad carried my inside to my room.  Upon awakening, I felt so ashamed that I had been caught napping (oh horror!), so I remembered what Angelina the mouse did in Angelina Ballerina:  she kicked her dresser holding her prized dancer statue, and it crashed to the ground and broke.  I kicked my dresser, and  - you guessed it - my Advent tree was atop it.  It didn't tip off or anything, but I ruined it nonetheless:  upon trying it out later, it would not play "Joy to the World."  The music box was broken, and there appeared to be no way to remove the wind-up component inside to be repaired.

Many years passed, and I could hardly remember the ornamented tree revolving and ringing its charming melody.  I and my mother decided to try another tiny-but-powerful tool:  dental floss.  Diligently and tediously, we stroked it across the tightly-glued wood base until at last a crevice was seen, and continued to loosen all four corners.  There it was: the dislodged metal reel, with notes like pinpoints all over it.  Paging through the lists of repairers in the phone directory, we came up with the name of one man a good distance away who cared for music boxes, and shipped off the mechanism and tree to him with hopeful thoughts.

Several weeks later, the little tree returned all put back together.  I removed it from the box, gave it a turn, and it began to twirl, sounding "Joy to the World" just as I remembered!  To this day, even in college, I enjoy decorating and listening to my Advent tree, and appreciate it all the more for its story.