Christmas-card images are warm memories

This will be my 12th Christmas in North Idaho. That may not seem like much to the old-timers, but for me it’s a long time in one place. I have had trouble putting down roots. Before Coeur d’Alene, I was in Las Vegas for six years, Pullman for four, Walla Walla for six, Memphis for three – and all that since college.

A lot has settled in for me here. It has not been any easy 12 years. North Idaho isn’t always an easy place for newcomers. I was making a lot more money in Las Vegas. But there’s a lot to be said for quality of life, and that’s what has kept me here.

I’m of the generation that grew up with the Bing Crosby notion that a white Christmas was something to hope for. But growing up in Portland, it was a vain hope. I moved here back in the days when we still had snow in the winter, and that first year I was thankful to have a most memorable white Christmas – a Christmas card-type white Christmas.

Recently I took myself back, into the memory of that first year …

It has been another cold night, but so calm that snow from the past few days of storm lies heavily, settling noticeably, crunching loudly when walked through. This morning, new snow is falling lightly, just enough to obscure, but not obliterate, yesterday’s tracks.

Today there is a still, odd winter beauty. It’s in the monotony of the color – a white so pure it seems unreal. It’s in the crispness of the air – so full of cold that it is invigorating. It’s in the sounds, if you can call them that, as they are more felt than heard, yet heard nonetheless, of snow falling.

This Christmas card scene gets better.

After breakfast is forced upon sleepy children and myriad snow clothes are rounded up, we pack the kids into the car for fulfillment of a dream I describe as a lifetime in the making. We are to rendezvous with a group that always, two Sundays before Christmas, drives past numerous lots where relatively cheap and perfectly proportioned Christmas trees are on sale.

They drive off the plowed and sanded security of city streets to brave the icy road adjacent to frozen Fernan Lake. They then pull their cars off this road with a questionable anticipation of making it back up the logging track that steeply drops away into a small meadow.

Or so I assume it to be. Currently it is perfectly level, an undisturbed plain of white. To myself, I question the usefulness of this track as an exit even before the small army of children and sleds packs and grooms it to ice.

But now we are off afoot, after the prize that has brought us past those city trees and city streets. We are out to find and cut our own Christmas tree. It costs us nothing, and it looks as if it cost us nothing.

Tall, but sparse and spindly, it is a real tree, having never felt a groomer’s shaping knife the way those parking-lot trees have. In fact, it has felt only winds and rains and snows and sunshine for its short five or six years. Realizing this, I feel a little guilty as I begin to saw. Our tree’s last snow shutters out of its branches as it tips.

But the Christmas card image continues to grow.

Someone is shouting about the sorry state of a friend’s choice while someone else howls about snow in his boots. The trek back toward the bonfire is harder now with the weight of the tree to be pulled, but the trip is lighter. Everyone is happy.

The kids, who initially were cold and did not want to walk in deep snow, are now noisy and bouncy with the warmth and excitement of the cut and haul. And we parents are happy and content, although complaining over the use of muscles not recently exercised, and over the awkwardness of layers of snow ware. Even the veterans of many of these Christmas tree expeditions sense the uniqueness of this opportunity, the individuality of this day.

Then, for me, a rare thing happens. In the middle of the event I actually stop and realize that this day, what will soon be a memory of a day, will take its place with a handful of other life events that will seem too storybooklike to have actually happened. I marvel, and feel good.

That goodness is especially brought home in the social hour after delivering the tree to the car. The kids are totally unencumbered now. Despite walking like moon explorers, they are fully at home in this element. Even hard falls on an icy patch elicit only smiles. Slides down the drive bring out wide grins and shrieks of laughter.

Hot cocoa and cookies quickly fill a void. Snowballs, snow banks, and snow-laden bushes provide endless distraction. Of course there will be tears when it is time to go. It is far too grand to leave without them.

I suspect that if I could, I too would argue to stay. But it is my job to be the sensible one, the practical assessor of time, temperature, and exposure – the bad guy. So I will cry in silence – a silence that lasts the whole ride home.

The trip home is quiet, warm, and sleepy for everyone. The discomfort of cramped quarters in wet snow clothes goes unnoticed. There is a contentment that reasonably should not be here. Each of us would describe it differently, I am sure.

It is for days such as this that we came. It is for days such as this that we adults are willing to worry over the reduced income and wonder at the bills. It is for days such as this – days that can last forever in pleasant memories – that I live, or at least find meaning in the living.

… and I am thankful still for the Christmas-card experience that I lived, my first winter in Coeur d’Alene. The fondness of the memory still makes me smile.