I remember well the first Christmas after I got married. My husband and I had moved from Iowa to Lancaster, PA at the end of November. It was just before the holiday season. Everything was feeling very strange. We had rented a house-trailer, a nice one at that, but it was the only thing that was available in that rural Amish community.
The night we went searching for a Christmas tree it was clear and cold, with many stars in the dark sky, similar, I suppose to the way it was on that night near Bethlehem when the shepherds saw a bright star in the heavens. I can remember the place we stopped. It was around a bend on one of the curvy roads that fanned out from Lancaster. We didn’t spend much time at it because it was so cold and we didn’t have much money. But it was a beautiful tree that fit well in the back seat and out the windows of our red and white 1956 Oldsmobile convertible. We had driven it all the way from Iowa only a few weeks earlier.
When we got to our trailer we found we were going to need to cut the bottom of the trunk off so it would fit in the tree stand. When we separated the branches we discovered that our tree already had a gift in it. We found a nest, hidden down in the thick branches at the bottom of the tree. All of a sudden that nest made us feel like this really was our new home.
It turned something that was so new and strange and different into an experience that welcomed us home to our new life. We would build a new nest, have children and learn to be the best we could possibly be together. And we still have that nest. It is a little bit worse for the years, like all of us, but every year for the last 30 it has perched in its own special place in each tree, reminding us of that first Christmas
Written Christmas 1994
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