I didn’t grow up in the country, but my family liked to pretend as much around Christmas. We'd build a fire together, drink eggnog together, and decorate our tree together — just the four of us, my parents, my brother, and I. From our home’s vantage in south Los Angeles, upon a hillside once known for grazing and specialty row crops, our living room overlooked an endless basin of suburban pavement and twinkling city lights. Our tree always went in this awkward catty-corner beside the living room windows, where it'd be secured into its stand and given a perimeter skirt of linen snow, and the singular soundtrack to our adorning of its limbs was Christmas with Willie Nelson. 

A pleasant scene; too pleasant for my liking. I envied my father’s childhood in the outskirts of Milwaukee, where it actually snowed. He found my longing for extreme weather ridiculous. So to deter me, he told stories of walking to school in nipple-high drifts and shoveling dirty slush on the weekends. To him, LA was paradise. Still, there was no convincing me of how good we had it, with our palm trees and lows in the high forties all winter long. Southern California’s scenery doesn’t offer the favored holiday hallmarks presented by pop culture, save for Australian imports. I yearned for snowflakes and sled rides, breath frozen on the air.

The holidays were not especially cherished in my family. My mom was raised Irish Catholicish; my father was raised Irish Catholic for real. He'd spent much of his youth getting beaten by ruler-wielding nuns, and he had no intention of subjecting my brother and I to these machinations of institutionalized religion (he identified as a Jedi, believed in “The Force,” and reported as much every Census). As such, I was raised agnostic, but we still participated in Christmas because… why not? It was supposedly fun. And everyone was doing it.

Much like religion, music seemed superfluous to my folks too. When driving me to baseball practice or to school or to the dentist, we listened to either AM talk radio, the rare oldies tune on K-Earth 101, or the tread of our tires. Christmas was the only time our home stereo system was put to use, and only to play this one Willie Nelson CD. When it was over, we’d play it again. Sometimes it'd play it a third time.

As such, Willie’s folksy-Christmas hymns became the only musical heritage passed on to me, and Willie’s voice became a touchstone of my memories around the holidays, particularly “Pretty Paper.” It was also my first introduction to the sound of a real country singer, the root of an affection that’s lasted, but one I didn’t fully appreciate until later. When I asked my mom how this album became so central to our Christmas-time rituals, and why I recall his voice so vividly, she said, “I don’t even know where we got that CD... But I do remember pretty paper… pretty ribbons of blue.” The album was likely beside the check-out line at Frye’s Electronics (at 75 percent off in the middle of July), and my dad snagged himself an impulse buy. But we can’t be sure.

Our ornaments were an assortment of mementos and tchotchkes, some of them being frail hand-me-downs from the forties and fifties (glass candy canes, draw-string nutcrackers, bejeweled shamrocks, Russian dolls), but most were grade school art projects that my brother and I had created out of pasta and pipe cleaners. My brother, generally much calmer and more patient than I, would heedfully unwrap each of the ornaments and arrange them on the carpet by type so we could strategize a measured, proportionate spread across the limbs. I’d be in charge of untangling the lights and various beads from our boxes of ornamentation. It was fool’s errand that kept me from consuming the See's Candies. 

These measly tree decorations wouldn’t have been aesthetically pleasing to anyone other than ourselves. They wouldn't have made for a suitable Sunset magazine cover. But that wasn’t the point. We just liked to indulge our sweet tooths, be together, and hang goofy stuff on juvenile pines.

As we'd wait to get our tree until the week before Christmas, the biggest and bestest trees had been already claimed. That was just fine. The trees we picked were intentionally modest, rarely taller than six feet and never flocked with that bullshit snow. Green, vigorous, symmetrical — those were our qualifiers, and I had a knack for identifying the ideal tree of those still available. It'd take a discerning eye to find the prize, though speed was too a factor, so I’d sprint up and down the rows of some strip-mall parking lot to find our beloved tree before my brother could. Everything was a competition between us, however one-sided; I generally won. Taking our tree home, haphazardly strapped to the roof of my dad’s brown 1985 Toyota Cressida, felt like we were hunters bringing home a slain buck in the back of our pickup. 

The act of decorating the tree was saved until Christmas Eve — ”There’s only so much holiday cheer one can muster,” was my mom's refrain — before Santa arrived. Not that I expected him to show. As a kindergartner, my good friend Scott chastised me for believing in the jolly, judgmental philanthropist. You know your parents put the presents under the tree, right? I was maybe five years old, but I knew I had been severely wronged. I stormed home from school and solemnly sat my dad down, as if I’d caught him in an affair, and began my interrogation. He copped to his deceit without hesitation. I then deduced the Easter Bunny, leprechauns, and all the other titans of a toddler’s delight were bogus as well. He seemed relieved.

Following my great awakening, there I was, year after year, sugar high on bottomless eggnog making the most of it, singing along to Willie, maintaining the ruse for the sake of my brother’s innocence that Santa was somehow going to finagle his way down our chimney with Super Soakers and Almond Rocas a plenty. On the night of Christmas I’d feign sleep long enough for my brother to actually doze off, before sneaking out of our shared bedroom, creeping up the stairs, and arriving in the living room to find my parents (and on special occasions my grandmothers, aunts, and very cool uncle as well) placing a fan of pretty paper below our slain conifer. I’d then drink the milk and eat the cookies we’d “left out for Santa.” Pretty sweet gig, I thought then and still believe now. It’s better to be in on the joke.

After a handful of years, we stopped celebrating Christmas, at least in the traditional, familial sense. We got older, the trees were a pain in the ass and terribly wasteful, nobody liked repackaging and storing all of the ornaments, and the mass of cheap, placeholder items gave way to singular acquisitions generally made months before the holidays that would serve as our “Christmas present” for that year. I liked this new system just fine. But there were no more trees. And no more Willie.

A few years ago, I was at my mother-in-law-of-sorts’ home around Christmas and she elected to put on Kenny G’s Christmas album. My partner gave me a glare that said, Be nice and stick this one out. My lady comes from a Kenny G household, is herself a Kenny G fan… Imagine my dread. 

I commandeered the stereo and promised the real deal, as far as holiday jams were concerned. They needed to experience the finest sonic delicacies of the season, at least as I remembered them to be, and Willie’s classic Christmas odes soon graced my ears for the first time in nearly two decades. They didn’t get the charm, and declared their preference for Kenny’s cheesy brass to Willie’s nasally baritone barely three tracks in. But I would not be deterred. It was the first time I’d felt any sort of holiday cheer since the nineties. We listened to the whole record end to end, and then I played it again for good measure.