Each year my father strung up the lights once and for all to where I could lean comfortably against the ottoman, squint my eyes, and fall into the bottomless greens and swirling draughts of baking and fir, there was surely never a time when he put up all the strands and only a single too-bright bulb was shining while the rest were dark. Nor does it seem likely now that he ever hid a single bulb on its own amidst the black branches of celebration.
What could cloud the rest so that one would stand so clear? The memory cannot be.
And yet it is there to orient, making sense of the unseen, burning its impression in my eyes, lingering when they are closed, imposing itself over the holidays. That single star might dip behind a branch, but only for the moment until I shift my gaze so slightly that it jumps back into full view, each reappearance of the never-absent another thrill of hope that rises out of the chest to form a lump in the throat that may burst forth in carol and chorus and voiceless utterances of free-floating joy.
The somber boughs of the year try as they may to reach further and fill fuller our sight, we who are lost in the dark of a room tied tight with love that binds, chords unseen in the unknown but waiting in the silence to cause us to stumble if we dare forget them. The months have passed and our solitude manifests more tangibly now, another thing to lean against with the surety of despair, and still we are bound to one another, perhaps more tightly than we will let ourselves know. The star promises that what we cannot see here and now is imminently near, as always, undermining all other frames we feign to trust, however despondently.
Nothing is as it should be. We are welcome to recognize it more fully as that long-awaited day approaches and the week slips by and we find ourselves on the threshold of promise and too much disappointment. The year has been dark. But still that light shines in the darkness. The darkness has not overcome it.