Angel Hair on the Tree
Parson to Person:
"Angel Hair on the Tree"
Dec. 30, 2022
One of my favorite singer/songwriters, Chris Williamson, grew up in Wisconsin (in a little place called Moonlight Ranch). This holiday season I've been thinking about a story she once told, of a Christmas she remembered from when she was a little girl, getting her "holiday haircut" from her mother. That year her dad gave her a non-material gift that she remembered for the rest of her life. Here's how she tells the story:
It was a great honor in our family to be chosen to place the Christmas angel on the very tip of the tree. Dad would hold the chosen child high in the air and the angel would slip over the tip until it shone high above the room. That Christmas, as the afternoon gave way to gradual darkness, Mom cut my hair. My long braids had been shorn to shoulder length and the hair was all around me on the floor. I remember feeling sort of small as I sat there on my hard chair in the kitchen. Dad came in out of the frosty cold with an armload of stove wood. He put it in the wooden box beside the stove and looked over at me, sitting so pensively on my chair. He knelt down beside me and picked up all the hair, newly shorn from my head. The next thing I knew he was calling us to the front room where the Christmas tree stood in all of its shining splendor. I watched him as he carefully placed bits of my brown hair on the tree beside the tinsel and the glittering glass balls. He turned and smiled sweetly down at me and said, "This year we will have real angel hair on the tree."
Some gifts are like that. They don't come wrapped or tied up with a bow, and they don't fit under a tree, but they seem to last a lot longer than physical ones. And they mean more too, because part of the gift is that it changes who we are. We become a little more assured, a little more confident, a little more generous than we might have otherwise been.
Each of us has received gifts like that--and the funny thing is that sometimes the giver didn't even know what they gave! But that's OK, because we ourselves have given gifts like that to others, without always knowing it either. It's like we're all living in a world of Secret Santas--some of whom we will eventually know, and others of whom will always remain anonymous. But in the end, perhaps that's the way it should be.
Happy Holidays, everyone, with (of course) a little...
peace and unrest,
tony
