Happy December. Many of you are most likely treading around, elf ears deep, in the rising tide of the holiday season, lashing yule logs together to stay afloat. Next month that tide will subside, and we’ll give a new year a go. This ebb and flow seems slow in the moment, but quite fleeting when one turns their attention towards all that has come and gone.

My wife and I started a family tradition, back when the kids were little, of venturing out into the Black Hills and cutting down our Christmas tree. With a Christmas tree permit of course. The authorities kick down your door and tear a wing off of your angel for a first offense Christmas tree poaching.

I’m not sure if we set out to start a family tradition at the time, or if it was just something we did once, and kept doing year-after-year? This year, like each of those past years, we went out into the Black Hills and found our Christmas tree. This year, unlike each of those past years, the “we” consisted of Dawn, myself, and our dog Pre. The kids are off “adulting”, revealing yet another territory our empty nest has encompassed. So it goes.

Before you get too far along in imagining us forlornly shuffling through the woods, I should inform you that a few years back the Richter family added this tradition as well, and began joining us for their own Christmas tree hunt. As always, Dawn and I enjoyed the company of my good friend Paul, his wife Jodi, and their four kids.

Paul and Jodi’s children haven’t fled to adulthood yet, so they can help Dawn and I deal with this now, and we’ll help them deal with it later. When their kids ditch them and the family traditions they’ve worked so hard to carry on through the years, we’ll be there. Four old people shuffling through the woods in search of Christmas past. I think I just wrote the plot to a Hallmark Christmas special.

I’ve decorated quite a few Christmas trees in my day, but this one proved to be the most difficult yet. Each ornament I took from the box of decorations had a memory attached to it, and I struggled with the weight of those memories. Dawn put a positive spin on the event, calling it our “honeymoon tree”, and we helped each other navigate yet another change in our lives.

Dawn suggested we watch a Christmas movie once the tree was properly festooned with memories from Christmas past. I was in the mood to wallow a bit longer in the past, and we watched home videos from Christmas 2002. I realized this had the potential of kicking me while I was down, but surprisingly, I found it quite cathartic. As I watched seven-year-old Sierra and three-year-old Jackson bounce around on screen, I felt some of that heaviness lift, and be replaced with gratitude.

The year 2002, sixteen short years ago (for the math impaired). Seems like you should be able to turn around and find everything and everyone it held not much more than an arm’s length away, but I found much of it has drifted beyond the capabilities of my reach.

What has changed in your life since 2002? I would imagine there’s been some good, and there’s been some bad, as that seems to be the way of things. There’s certainly nothing wrong with pausing our forward momentum to honor our memories with a few tears now and then, but that trees not going to decorate itself. Forward we must go.