I lost the romance of this place
and woke up old. One darling
fantasy shattered over the next,
folding over a fist drenched
in my hip. The Christmas trees
are bound and stacked up
outside, the air can’t decide
what to make of itself, and we
are about to throw a president
out. You are not your mother,
and each of your dead lives on
in you and smells like the moon.
Large and mosquito-like,
my prose clatters off
my fingers. I woke up old
and into happy uncertainty,
the vitamins I feed to the streets,
the real relations within a bead.
Oh pouring cylinder, stark
uncertainty, racket of leaves
helicoptering to their death —
my love is coming out
over and over again.
Here it is, what
I always wanted. The air
spills ash; I suppose
it is light.

Maggie Nelson, “Eighteen Days Until Christmas”

Saturday, December 7
43 degrees

Some people want trees that look like trees they’ve had in the past. They hold up their phones to my face and say, “Got any like this?” And if I do, they’re grateful and kind.

Other people buy trees with bald spots or crooked tops because they feel bad for ugly trees.

Some people lose their minds for trees with lots of cones, or skinny trees, or trees that look “lime green.”

One of the guys told me that a few years ago, a couple picked out a tree with a bird’s nest in it and the nest flew off in the delivery truck. They sent a long, agonized complaint to the nursery’s email address, explaining that they’d suffered a miscarriage earlier in the year. When they saw the nest in that tree, they knew the coming year would be better. And now, they said, we had ruined their Christmas.

Jake Maynard, “Christmas Tree Diary“

Another happy story — I guess I didn’t finish that one but anyway it was a memory — was of Christmas time as a young child. The first part of Christmas usually started with going to pick out a huge Christmas tree in the wee morning hours at this supermarket called the Co-op where we used to get our Christmas tree every year, and everybody was frantically out there, dressed up in their heavy clothes — topcoat and boots, maybe, and a hat — scrumming around looked for these Christmas trees. I remember the smell of it still. Then finally by daylight we’d finally find something that was suitable, and I remember dragging it to the car and taking it home and later trimming it. It was just the three of us, though — me, my mom and my dad. Pretty soon that tree started to die, and by Christmas time it was completely dead with needles all over the floor and my mother screaming and vacuuming them up. Anyway, that was the start of the Christmas season. Then I guess the middle part of it was taken up with school things. Learning songs for the Christmas show we’d put on for the parents. Learning some old tacky Christmas carol to sing, everyone’s voice singing so ugly and everyone saying that sounds so beautiful. — Melissa laughed in disgust. — And then finally getting all dressed up and on Christmas morning singing it for the parents. And another part of that was towards the end kind of getting antsy, wondering what Santa was going to bring. To this day I think I was the oldest person ever to believe in Santa Claus. I remember when I was eight being told by my mother that there was no Santa and just breaking down in tears and stuff ’cause I didn’t want to hear it. ‘Cause just a year and a half or so before she’d spank me for trying to tell her that I’d heard there was no Santa. Crazy woman. OK, enough about that.

William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria