I put up my Christmas tree right after Thanksgiving. I broke with family tradition years ago because my kids could t wait. Because I couldn’t remember my mother’s specific day when we always put up the tree.

Today. The 17th. Today is the traditional day when my family always out up the Christmas tree. Today is my late grandmother’s birthday. She’s been gone for 25 years.

Throughout my childhood, we were always the last family to decorate our Christmas tree. I was so envious of my friends whose families decorated early in December. It was like they had a longer Christmas.

But when the 17th hit, my family was full in. We followed my mother’s traditions to a T.

Fake tree. With color coordinated branches anchored in specific pegs around a wooden axis. Somewhere in my teens, I took on that task but I remember always feeling like it was a magical world to come into the house and finding the tree waiting.

Then the lights. With Mom, Peter, and then me in a train, chasing each other around the tree while looping lights and then garland (garlic according to Peter) around the tree branches.

And then the glass bulbs and the ornaments. Each in their specific places. And each hung by a specific person. Peter and I had ornaments we had made. Ornaments with our names on them.

Mom laid out the advent calendars from past years. They were set in the buffet and I would sneak them to the table where I narrated stories to myself, using the calendars as my inspiration.

And then finally the Christmas angel. A horribly ugly creature Peter crafted when he was really young. Styrofoam ball glued to a paper plate body with paper plate wings. Pipe cleaner arms and hands that looked like spider claws. And all spray painted gold.

I hated that damn thing. It terrified me and did not stand for Christmas. But I put up with it because Mom loved it and really the entire tree ceremony was hers.

Tonight my parents are decorating the same Christmas tree that we have had since I was a girl. And tonight they are pulling out all of the same ornaments that have been made and painted and gifted since Peter and I were children. And tonight, Mom will perch the ugly gold spider angel or the tree top.

I keep coming back to the same words. How much I miss Peter. How much I feel like this part of my life is frayed because of his absence.

And tonight those words have a new texture. Christmas was always my holiday. I took it on because of the incredible joy and thrill associated with this holiday. And then things changed and the holiday lost its luster.

Tonight, the holiday has a new edge. A new fiber run through it. My daughter and I decorated the tree and I helped because I wanted my daughter to be happy.

We have our own nostalgic items on the tree. A ninja knife from Halloween. Disney princesses. A glass outhouse.

I don’t have Peter’s ugly angel. And I’m thankful for that. But I miss it.