On Christmas Eve

In the absence of cards, carols, and my mother's cranberry bread, I decided I had to have a Christmas tree in Arambol this year. For some reason, my Muslim friends got really excited about the possibility.

"Yes!" they said. "You can put it in our shop!"

To prevent incurring the wrath of Allah, I suggested we call it an Eid Shrub. They agreed.

We took a taxi to nearby Mapusa, where vendors sell tiny lights, tinsel, garlands, and cheap plastic ornaments. I stocked up on all of the above and then looked around in vain for a Christmas tree lot. "What do the Indians hang this stuff on?" I wondered.

A few stalls sold fake trees, but I have to carry all my possessions on my back for the next three months. I was hesitant to invest in something I'd have trouble getting rid of.



I carried my lights and garlands back to the source of all my Indian cultural knowledge, the steps of the Blue Fin Guesthouse, and asked my Goan friends for ideas.

"There are pine trees down the beach, towards Mandrem," the guesthouse manager told me. "Go there on Christmas Eve and cut a branch for a tree."

Perfect.

This morning, I did my yoga by Christmas lights (strung up on my window until I got a tree) and headed to the steps with a giant papaya under my arm. My plan: share the papaya in exchange for borrowing some sort of saw/axe implement to aid my hunt for the tree.

I got downstairs and the Blue Fin roomboy looked at me sternly and said, "No papaya this morning!"

I knew he was joking because last night, when they'd seen me carrying the fruit up to my room, all the boys had begged me to stop and cut it open right then. I laughed and asked for a knife and a plate.

"No papaya," he said again. And then he told me why: the old man died last night.

Blue Fin has its own ghost - an old, old German tourist who looks too thin to live and rarely emerges from his room. When he does, he doesn't speak and usually just sits staring quietly at the sea. We've all joked uneasily, more than once, that it's like he came here to die. Last night, he did.

The roomboy found his body this morning. The old man had left his door open, as if he'd known someone should come look in on him.

I took the papaya back upstairs and we all sat on the steps, staring at the sea while policemen in beige uniforms loitered nearby and yelled ineffectually at the beggars on the beach.

When it was clear there was nothing I could do, I decided to look for a tree anyway. I didn't want to trouble anyone for a saw, so I just got up quietly. I edged down the alley, past a black jeep with white letters reading "Hearst-Van."

I found the pine grove about a quarter-mile down the beach. Most of the branches were far too high for me to touch. The few I could reach were spindly and lop-sided. I felt guilty about breaking even one branch off a tree, especially since I doubted these feathery Indian evergreen branches would even stand up straight by themselves. But the sun was hot and I was rapidly losing the reachable options to better-prepared locals with ladders and axes, so I finally grabbed a branch about as wide as my thumb and started pulling.

Christmas or no, the tree did not want me to have this branch. The wood squeaked and splintered, but wouldn't break. I twisted the limb and received a needly slap in the face. I yanked and cursed in a decidedly un-Christian manner as sweat poured down my forehead. Finally, the branch came loose.

I held it up for a proper examination and it listed immediately to one side. It was weak and sparse, evoking nothing so much as Charlie Brown's tiny mishapen Christmas tree. Whatever. It was mine.

I carried it back across the sand to the steps of the Blue Fin. My Muslim friends, my Christmas tree/Eid shrub champions, were nowhere in sight. The Blue Fin manager, who's been celebrating Christmas all his life, stared skeptically at my prize.

"You didn't get a big one?" he said finally.

"I was really limited by what I could reach or break with my bare hands," I said defensively.

"Why didn't you get someone to cut one for you?" he asked, as if the village was crawling with lumberjacks for hire.

I shrugged. He asked me where I intended to put it.

"Right here," I said, pointing to the storefront place of honor we'd already chosen for the Eid/Christmas tree/shrub.

He shook his head. "Maybe you could put it by your room instead," he suggested. (My room is on the third floor, next to the toilet.)



I took the hint and carried my rejected tree upstairs, past the open door of the old man's now-empty room, which reeked of antiseptic.

The roomboy filled a bucket with sand and stuck the spindly little branch inside. It immediately slumped over. He ran to get a bucket of water and made the sand wet. No good. The tree refused to stay up. Undaunted, he lifted it on top of the balcony railing and tied it upright to the building's support post.

"OK?" he asked, looking at me for approval.

"Wonderful," I said. He left and I got out my tinsel and tiny plastic balls and decorated the tree as best I could. The tinsel kept flying off in the wind and the branches couldn't handle more than one ornament and there was nowhere to plug in the lights, but eventually I got it done.

I took pictures of my creation, but the branches were so thin, there was no way to obscure my neighbor's underwear drying on the clothesline behind the tree. As I tried new photographic angles with limited success, the glue gave way on an ornament and the silver ball bounced away onto the roof below.



I put the camera down. This was, without a doubt, the most meager tree I had ever, ever seen.

"Merry Christmas!" a man's voice called out behind me. My European neighbor was grinning shyly at my tree as he walked to his room.

"Merry Christmas!" I called back, waving with a ridiculous amount of enthusiasm, trying to catch the tinsel as it blew off the tree again. Yes, I thought. It's the spirit of the tree that matters! I looked at my humble tree with new, loving eyes and thought about how lucky I am to be decorating any sort of tree on a balcony overlooking the Arabian Sea.

I felt warm in the certainty that Christmas is all about what's inside us, and therefore, I can carry it anywhere I go! The glow of this revelation lasted about five minutes, until my friends began quizzing me about whether I would be dressed properly for midnight mass tonight.

"Yes, yes," I said. "I have a new salwaar kameez I bought special."

My Goan friends looked skeptical. "Better shoes?" they asked. "What about makeup?"

"Um, I have lip gloss?"

They shook their heads. "First the tree and now this," their expressions said. "What is wrong with America?"

"She doesn't need makeup!" my Kashmiri friend defended me. "She's a simple girl!"

Of course, being Muslim and having never attended a midnight mass, his opinion was rapidly discounted.

"Make-up," they repeated decisively.

And there you have it, or rather, me. A simple girl, with a humble tree, who is rapidly learning there is no place like home for the holidays.

I wish you the best and brightest of the Christmas season and a wonderful New Year.