Around the Table

There's no one right way to celebrate the holidays—and that's what makes them memorable

- Marni Jackson

MY PRAIRIE-RAISED FATHER was normally a patient, cheerful man. The only time we heard him swearing, in fact, was when he was putting up the outdoor Christmas lights. He was an engineer who liked well-made things that ran smoothly, not the nightmare tangle of half-burnt-out bulbs and wires that he had to haul out of the basement every year. The sound of him gently cursing as he stood on a ladder stringing lights along the eavestrough became an annual tradition our family's version of the sound of reindeer hooves on the roof.

The other Christmas task that darkened his mood was the insertion of the tree-usually a long-needled, prickly one-into the fiendishly tiny stand, a green iron thing the size of a teacup. My brother and I would then be conscripted to stand across the room and direct “More to the left” as my father lay muttering under the bottom boughs, micro-adjusting the angle, with his engineer's need to get it exactly right.

And every year he would carefully unsnarl a set of multicoloured, candle-shaped lights that bubbled like a glass of champagne. But they had to be perfectly upright to bubble. This called for more clucking and tweaking on my father's part.