The Hill is Home

This is my Christmas tree. Procured from Fragers and decked out in mostly Ikea and Target ornaments with a snowman on top.

You can’t see it here but be assured that my tree is tastefully lit with simple white lights. Electric lights.

But this here?

This is not an ornament.

If you look closely you’ll see it is a candle holder. Very pretty, made of gold and carefully weighted and designed to hang straight when filled with a small burning candle.

No I am not insane. I am married to a Finn.

My Finnish mother-in-law, who has lived in Fairfax for nearly thirty years, raised him and his brother on candle-lit Christmas trees. He adored the tradition and it took him a few years to begrudgingly admit that strung electric lights were not tacky. The dirty secret I have to share today is that many Scandinavians  still use real candles. They come in little boxes. The Finnish community here in the DC area can legally purchase them at Christmas bazaars.

When I first learned of this scandalous, death-tempting tradition and asked the inevitable American question about fire safety I was told that Yanks are just uptight and litigious. Fair enough.

The candles are lit only when family is gathered around the tree, most often on Christmas Eve. While I found it shocking at first I have come to really love them. The ritual of lighting them after dinner, opening gifts in their glow while drinking glögg and listening to mournful Finnish Christmas songs.

So this became our Christmas ritual. A quiet, candle-lit Christmas eve in Fairfax followed by a Christmas morning drive up the Turnpike to my loud, fun and exuberant family in Jersey. It worked for many years.

But then came the year we messed with nature. 2004.

We had moved away, renting out our house on the Hill and trying out life in a apartment outside New York in Hoboken, NJ with our two small boys. It was nice to be near my family but I missed the Hill. Since we had spent so much time with my family that year we decided to spend all of Christmas with my mother-in-law here.

The warning signs were pretty clear that something was seriously wrong with the universe. A pipe burst and flooded the basement of our Hill house and it leaked into our neighbors’ garage a few days before the holiday. On the drive south on Christmas Eve our always-reliable car broke down. We rented a behemoth SUV and made it to Fairfax by dinner. Our traditional Christmas Eve was uneventful. But on Christmas day I flooded my mother in law’s basement while doing laundry and spent a few frantic hours with the wet-dry vac attempting to save her carpet.

I didn’t like the low key, well no-key really, Christmas day. I was used to special dinners, lots of family and the amazing hummus my aunt always brought from Brooklyn. Finns do all their celebrating on Christmas Eve…I was glum. So to salvage the day, my husband and I decided to leave the kids with their Mummu and go to a movie. We’d heard good things about Sideways….

I put the baby down to sleep while Mummu lit the candles on her tiny tree, a bush really, and got ready to read to the four year old.

The tree hadn’t been watered and it was dry.

I was this close to getting out the door when the whole damn thing went UP IN FLAMES.

Mother-in-law grabbed the tree, opened the back door and threw it off the deck…into the piles of leaves and dead twigs.

“Mom, you’re going to start a forest fire!” screamed my husband as he grabbed the hose.

“This Christmas!” she said…”60 years of Christmas trees this never happens but THIS Christmas…”

The four year old hid under the table and to this day he still has a slight fear of candles, camp fires and fireplaces.

We ended up watching Sideways on DVD several months later and were back on the Hill by April. The universe had spoken. We knew where we belonged.

My candle holders are empty. I don’t trust our kids or our luck. But this Christmas Eve we will light the candles in Fairfax. Some traditions are worth the risk.