ArticleLast year, we bought The Most Beautiful Christmas Tree.
We drove out to the Adelaide Hills, having heard rumours of a field out the front of a church dotted with plump, perfectly conical trees. We wandered around in the heat, admiring this one and that one, debating how high our ceilings are and how big our car is. They were $50 each. It was almost too good to be true.
We picked out the tree for us, and a very nice man chopped it down. It fit in the car (just). Our 7-month-old was thrilled to have a real live tree inside the car, within grabbing distance (in retrospect, this may be the part that horrifies me the most).
We drove back down to Adelaide, gleeful, gloating over what a bargain we’d got, just a little bit Christmas-smug.
That didn’t last long.
‘Give it a good soak with the hose,’ the very nice man had told us, ‘and then let it dry out for a day, to get all the bugs out.’
So we did. Or so we thought. Twenty-four hours later, we triumphantly carried The Most Beautiful Christmas Tree inside to decorate it. We strung lights, arranged tinsel, listened to carols, batted grabby hands away from low-hanging baubles.
Later that night, I spotted a lurker in the branches: a huntsman. In a glow of Christmas spirits, I benevolently allowed my husband to escort it from the house in a take-away container instead of squishing it.
Later, he admitted to noticing a tiny spider in the container alongside Mummy Huntsman. Perhaps wisely, he did not mention this to me at the time.
That was the beginning.
The next day, curled up in my armchair and basking in the presence of The Most Beautiful Christmas Tree and the general goodwill of the season, I glanced up and realised we were not alone. Perhaps a dozen tiny huntsmen dotted the ceiling.
Bub and I rapidly exited the room. When my husband – who believes in spiders’ right to life and liberty, and possibly the pursuit of happiness, depending on how acutely their happiness comes into conflict with ours – got home from work, he retrieved the take-away container and dutifully gathered up each baby, to be reunited with its mother out back.
The next day, a dozen more appeared on the ceiling.
It was at this point that the Mortein came out.
It was also at this point that I googled, with some trepidation, how many babies a huntsman has at a time. (As I’d feared, the answer was somewhere in the region of TWO HUNDRED.)
It was at this point that we turned the Mortein on the tree itself. So much for our field-to-lounge-room, all-organic, peace-on-earth Christmas. Instead I felt like Herod, raining down slaughter upon the innocents, maddened by a sense of existential threat.
And it was at this point that the earwigs started dropping from the tree like, um, flies?
For days, we battled them. We fought them in the lounge, we fought them in the hall. We fought them in the bathroom and in the laundry, we fought them – alas – in the bedroom. We did not surrender. But we didn’t feel very Christmassy either, amid the carnage.
Slowly, the tide of earwigs diminished, and we found fewer and fewer micro-spiders dotted around the house like miniature many-eyed elves on our shelves. We were victorious, but it was a pyrrhic victory; we were also haunted. What if we hadn’t got them all? Would we spend the next year stumbling across ever-larger survivors? Would the spared first batch of siblings return, bent on revenge? I was starting to think like a cold-blooded Roman conqueror; it’s safest to leave no survivors.
I googled: How long do huntsmen live? (Answer: TWO YEARS.)
(I googled: and is the plural huntsmen, or huntsmans? Answer: depends who you ask. ‘Huntsman spiders’ offers a workaround.)
A year on, I feel sure there must be a metaphor in there somewhere. I don’t repent of my quest for the perfect Christmas tree, exactly; but I can concede that my desire to airbrush out the ugly, inconvenient bits in fact has very little in common with Christmas as originally conceived.
The first Christmas, like the two thousandth-odd, is easy to sugarcoat; but the story of the nativity is less picturesque than we make it sound. Real angels are terrifying, not rococo. Real shepherds are smelly and dirty, not rustic chic. Mary’s pregnancy is scandalous; Jesus being laid in a manger is humiliating; the holy family’s safety is precarious.
Yet the story is bursting with life and glory and hope. It’s the story of a God who does not float ethereally above our mess but enters into it, in a gush of amniotic fluid and into a hostile regime that would one day nail him to a cross.
My buggy Christmas tree – our generally glitchy celebrations – may be closer in spirit to the nativity than the picture-perfect festivities we aspire to.
This time of year should be, not a sentimental detour away from the ‘real’ world; not a case of ‘duck syndrome’ – where we seek to make everything look effortless and magical on the surface, while paddling desperately underneath the water to maintain the illusion – but a solemn, imperfect feast that brings us closer to the very substance and marrow of our lives.
The cumulative fatigue of the year; the tears that come unexpectedly at a particular line in a carol (a thrill of hope … the weary world rejoices); the deeply hard work of peace, whether in international diplomacy or within our fragile domestic circles – the Christmas story is more than capacious enough to enfold whatever we bring to it. It invites us not to sweep our troubles under the rug for the season, but to bring ‘good news of great joy for all the people’ to bear on them: an assurance that God took up our troubles, big and small, when he took up our humanity.
We didn’t get a Christmas tree this year (we’ll be away). Though I did find an earwig the other day. A remnant earwig? Member of a new guard? The world is full of bugs.
Christmas is teaching me that Most Beautiful is not the same thing as most immaculate, or most pleasant. That it’s not about eliminating life’s bugs, but drawing near to a truth that is robust enough to account for them, and so glorious as to transcend them.
Natasha Moore is a Senior Research Fellow at of the Centre for Public Christianity and author of The Pleasures of Pessimism. She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Cambridge.
This article was first published by Eureka Street.Â