I have a Chirstmas tree. It’s up and it’s decorated.

I actually put it up late in 2021.

And I never took it down.

It’s not a real Christmas tree. It’s a small, plastic tree with a few tiny ornaments on it. I put it up in late 2021, the year I had moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Reno, Nevada.

I had only been living here for a few months. I moved to Reno from the Bay Area after I lost most of my jobs and my home.

I’ve written about this before. During the pandemic I got wiped out. In my role as a web application engineer, I lost all of my web clients because they could no longer afford to hire me. I was also a ticket seller for the Oakland A’s, but they did not have any work for me since there were no fans coming to the ballpark during lockdowns. My girlfriend not only broke up with me, she tossed me out of her house. I was in a temporary place, desperately trying to find an affordable place to live in the Bay Area. After several weeks of not being able to find a place, I gave in and realized I needed to look outside of the Bay Area and its back-breaking out-of-control rents.

During this time my mother was also in a jam. Her house was being remodeled and needed a place to stay. It also turned out that she had badly mismanaged her finances, and she was also facing her own housing and financial crisis. My aunt and my cousins were all outraged with me, complaining that I was not helping out my mother. But there was nothing I could so. I was also in a financial bind, and I had lost my home. I could not give my mother any money and I had no place for her to live. Trying to find housing, I was looking everywhere, North, South, and East, until I found a place I could afford.

Only a week after I moved to Reno, I got a call from my step-dad, letting me know that my mother had died suddenly.

In a very short amount of time I lost virtually everything: my jobs, my home, my hometown, and to top it all off I lost the only member of my family who truly meant something to me.

Later that year, in December of 2021, something else happened, something that has never happened to me before in my entire life:

I did not receive any Christmas presents. Not one.

That it was my first Christmas without my mother was a prime factor in that event. My mother was a Christmas junky. She loved Christmas. And if nothing else, I could expect a present from her. Of course there was the absence of a partner, and I only occasionally got presents from friends or other family members. Given that my relations with almost all my other family members were completely strained, I couldn’t well expect anything from them.

It’s not the expectation of material gifts that was disappointing, it was the absence of the ritual. It was the disappearance of a key part of the Christmas tradition that punctuated everything that I lost that year, as if I needed another point of emphasis about those circumstances. It was a sounding well of where I was in life. I never envisioned a time where I would not have some kind of Christmas, if not with a family gathering, at least with a partner or my mother.

This is not an essay I want to write, it’s pretty much one I have to write. Ever since my giftless Christmas, I have left up that tree. I have no compulsion to take it down. It’s a reminder of the sound of that year, the Yuletide punctuation that echoes like an abyss, telling me my life had and was crumbling apart to the point where any real connections to a home, a hometown, a partner, or friends or family were crumbling away.

I’ve often pointed out that Christmas really is an economic holiday in the West. Gift giving is the central ritual of this holiday. That is true regardless of all the protestations by others that it’s really a religious or spiritual time. But it is the ritual. Even with the “gimme gimme” aspect of the holiday, it still a showing of personal bonds.

On that lonely Christmas day back in 2021, I stayed put in my apartment; eating, drinking eggnog, and playing video games. My present to myself was to turn on the heat and leave it on.(I usually only turn it on for short periods of time to save money, and more often than not I just mummify myself in warm clothes so I don’t have to turn it on at all.) And that’s hard to admit. It’s hard to expose the fact that I had a presentless winter holiday and only celebrated by slouching around in my place. In retrospect I probably should’ve looked for some sort of 12 step event, gone to an AA meeting, or bugged the hell out of a friend of mine long enough to get them to talk to me on the phone.

But with everything that was going on my instinct was to withdraw, to just keep to myself. That’s still my instinct. I’m not telling this story of yuletide woe because I want sympathy, or because I want to receive sympathy gifts this year. This tale is mostly a reminder, a reminder that, no matter where you are in life, a dramatic and unexpected turn could happen at any moment. For me it was the Covid pandemic. I doubt I would be here if that had not happened. I doubt I would be living several hundred miles away from the only hometown I’ve ever really known. Life can swing up or down at a breakneck roller coaster pace.

I’m currently trying to make that roller coaster work for me, working to make my novels go viral trying to market them every day. It’s a hope I have that maybe I can make the ebb and flow of life turn my way, instead of everything deciding to come crashing down around me, or just take me to random directions of its own whims.

A friend of mine asked me, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I honestly answered that I didn’t know. Five years from now I could be buying overpriced vegan chocolate from Whole Foods for my five bedroom condo in San Francisco, or I could be living in my car, or anything in between. It’s the not knowing, not knowing where my life will go. My future is a total roulette wheel, and I have no idea which way it will spin. And that, more than anything, scares the hell out of me.

So the tree stays up. And as long as I live in this apartment, until I either move out, get evicted, or just end up dying here, that tree remains where it is, on top of one of my bookcases.

It’s not like I need that tree to remind me of what’s transpired. But it’s my signpost, my gargoyle, my totem, of my recent life turns and lessons.