Sam Falco

Sweetie and I have been spending an hour each weekend on a modified form of “Swedish Death Cleaning.” Over the course of two decades in this house, we’ve let a lot of clutter accumulate. We have a large home repair and remodeling project coming up, and that has prodded us to get rid of things. After finishing with the basement recently, we turned to the big central closet. It took us two weekends to get clean it out, and the final stage was when we reached the Christmas ornaments and decor.

We stopped putting ornaments on the tree the year after PK finally became an indoor cat, because she kept knocking the tree over and breaking the ornaments. For several years after that, we had a “Cats-mas tree.” We’d put up our little, fake Christmas tree and pack its boughs with cat toys. After Chubby Huggs joined the household, the two of them beat the crap out of that tree until it was a bedraggled mess and we got rid of it. Then, a couple of years of hectic December work schedules kept us from decorating. We got out of the habit. Stuff piled up in front of those boxes, and we forgot they were there.

Once we got to them, though, I remember what was in one of them. About a dozen ornaments from my childhood, hand-made by someone on my mother’s side of the family. “Unc” made one for every child in the family, every year. I looked at the box, and I said to Carolyn, “This is going to be painful to go through.” I braced myself and opened the box.

They might as well have been museum pieces. I felt no attachment to them.

Upon reflection, I realized that I had never cared about them. Every year, I’d open a gift that I couldn’t play with, wear, eat, or read. Later that day, I’d have to write a thank-you note for it that my mother deemed sufficiently heart-felt. A week after that, I’d pack it away with the rest of the ornaments. I’d kept those ornaments because they were important to my mother, and she thought they should be important to me. I’d kept them because of the echo of someone else’s sentiment that I’d allowed to become an obligation.

There was one ornament in that box that I liked, and I kept it. But the rest are gone. Hanging on to belongings because they meant something to someone who has been gone for years is a cruel memorial. It turns the dead into tyrants. Who would want to be remembered that way?