Christmas Eve

This evening I would like to share a memory of our first Christmas Eve at Rosslyn in 2008.

It was to be our first Christmas at Rosslyn. For weeks we had been racing the calendar, coaxing the team forward, cramming days into hours to ensure that construction would finally end and Rosslyn would at last graduate from all-consuming renovation to home. In time for our first Christmas at Rosslyn.

And it actually looked like we were going to — for the first time in several years — successfully meet a deadline. Of course, there would be some loose ends. But we wanted, no, we needed this journey to end. To transition from one adventure, to another, from creating a home to living at home.

But one important detail had slipped through the cracks. Only a few days from Christmas. We still had not found the time to get a Christmas tree. So we decided to cut a tree after attending a friend’s annual winter solstice the next morning.

And then the snow began. Lots of snow. All day, all evening, all night,… When it was time to depart pre-dawn for the sunrise gathering, the roads were still pretty impassible. So we bundled up, put on snowshoes, and headed out into the snowy darkness with freshly baked muffins and a poem to share. 

Friendship and food, songs sung and poems recited, salutation to a general brightening (sunrise veiled through snowy, overcast skies) that we hailed as the beginning of longer, brighter days ahead. Community coalescing. Communing. Laughing and sharing hopes. Readying for Christmas and New Year’s. Closing one chapter and preparing to open a new chapter.

Returning home on foot from winter solstice party gathering at Tom Duca‘s house so much snow. Christmas and Essex had come and gone prior to the snow, but so much had fallen since then that the road sidewalks were flanked with snowbanks to steep to easily cross. We walked from the south side of town, down “Bull Run”, past the Cupola House, past the Lapine House. As we approached the Essex Inn we began to notice discarded Christmas trees laying atop the snow banks. These were trees that had been decorated for Christmas in Essex., Now, discarded, ornamentless, awaiting retrieval for chipping or composting.

Susan and I had been wondering aloud how long to wait before the roads would be safe enough to head out searching for a Christmas tree. Although the Essex town crew snow had been working hard plowing, conditions were still challenging.

As we talked, I lifted a discarded Christmas tree out of the road that fallen down from the snowbank. Instead of laying it on top of the snow blank, I spiked the base of the trunk into the snowbank, standing the tree on end as if it were alive. It was the quintessential Charlie Brown Christmas tree. And we loved it.

“Let’s recycle it!” Susan said. “That can be our Christmas tree.”

It made perfect sense. Why cut down another tree when we could reuse this one?

I dragged the tree past Town Hall and the old firehouse then up the small hill by the ferry dock past the Belden Noble Library and Greystone. The fog had begun to burn off, and Lake Champlain, still unfrozen, was whipping up into whitecaps. Waves crashing against Rosslyn’s pier sent sparkling sprays into the air.

As we snowshoed past Sunnyside, dragging our Christmas tree behind us we heard a saw whining behind Rosslyn. A couple of carpenters had come despite the snowy roads to finish the deck. By the time we arrived with our tree in tow Doug Decker, Kevin Boyle, and Warren Cross had shoveled all the snow off the new garapa deck, and they had begun working on scribing trim boards and creating two removable deck sections to provide access to a Bilco door that would be concealed beneath the deck.

Our secondhand Christmas tree provoked some lighthearted teasing, but we were swelling with joyful gratitude. We felt as if the hand-me-down tree was a gift from our community, and now we were witnessing these generous members of our hardworking team braving a snowstorm to drive to Rosslyn where they labored mightily to remove the snow from the deck and then leaned into the obviously inhospitable work conditions to help achieve our ambitious deadline.

Over the next two days, these three men and several others made sacrifices and struggled well beyond any reasonable expectation to help us reach our dream to complete construction in time to celebrate our first Christmas at Rosslyn. Which takes me to Christmas Eve sitting in our still incompletely furnished living room with our dog and our Charlie Brown Christmas tree. So long anticipated. So perfect on every level. So grateful to everyone who made this possible.

A decade and a half later this first Rosslyn Christmas remains as poignant. Now nostalgia wrapped, the beneficiaries of a hand-me-down Christmas tree, a munificent crew who shared our dream to celebrate Christmas and year’s end with accomplishment and completion, and a sheltering home that has sheltered families for two centuries we are well aware of our good fortune. Essex and Rosslyn have shared an abundant inheritance that has genuinely, meaningly transformed our lives. And we are forever grateful.