There was the festival of trees, a place we went every other year (it was too expensive to go every year). Sometimes I went there with a school trip or my girl scout troop, but usually my mother took my sister and me on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. The festival of trees is held every December at the Albany Institute of History & Art, which has old cast iron potbelly stoves in the basement and a mummified cat. Years later, some twenty years after I first saw it, the mummified cat was x-rayed and determined to actually be a dog. The festival of trees was a charity event; the Ladies’ auxiliary, senior high girl scout troupe 351, the Masons and many churches all donated trees with the name of their organization printed on a card under the tree. The trees were decorated before they were sent to the art institute; how was the delicate cargo transported? Magic cocoon, perhaps? A perpetual mystery.
We’d drive there, park at a meter, and run in to the museum out of the cold upstate New York December. A giant pine greeted you in the entryway, it seemed like it was still alive. The decorated trees were displayed everywhere, there were at least a hundred and you could take as long as you wanted, walking slowly through the forest of Christmas trees. Unlike every other public space in December, there was no piped-in Christmas music in the art institute. The only sounds were hushed voices of people walking by and the occasional cane clicking on the museum floor.
On some trees tiny lights flickered gently on and off. Others kept their lights on all the time. Warm white lights hung from a white evergreen with silver tinsel and glass bells. The giant multi-colored bulbs that hang from old patios in summer were there too, seemed to string across whole rooms. Balsam fir trees decked out in gold garland and red, purple, yellow, green, gold and blue decorations. A twelve foot giant covered in fragile paper stars, with a paper angel at the top. One evergreen housed hundreds of hand-made yarn people, whole colorful families straight from the mysterious mountains of South America. I thought of the mothers and children making yarn people for this tree, having Christmas slightly differently than I would (I was eight or nine). A Scotch pine had the whole alphabet hanging from its bows. Its carved wooden letters were beautifully painted with animals (later, in the gift shop, I begged my mother to get me the letter Z, with a zebra head peeking out from behind; I still have it somewhere).
It’s hard to accurately describe my memories of the Festival of Trees, because I was small and even then it felt dream-like; it’s hard to recall dreams from twenty years ago. Mostly it was like this: I was young enough to completely detach from the world outside and spend a few fantastic hours in a place of carefully crafted beauty. To see the holiday from another side, apart from gifts, materialism, rituals, noise and even words; it was a place for seeing only, for quietly taking in every pattern and play of light.