i love the smell of a live (well, recently cut down) christmas tree in the house. when i was a kid i would look forward to the nights when everyone else would go upstairs to bed and i’d be left alone to sit on the sofa and gaze into the tree dreamily, the house dark except for the white lights* on the tree and very quiet, but with that cozy feeling that accompanies a house full of sleeping people.

since i’ve lived on my own, i’ve never had my own christmas tree. there have been many student/artist-budget approximations: mistletoe over the door in our toyon dorm room; the year hannah and i thumb tacked christmas lights in the shape of a tree on the wall of our apartment in buffalo; the year i went through an urban home depot’s dumpster and collected the cast-off branches they were trimming off the bottom of the christmas trees and decorated the mantle of my first chicago apartment with them. (home depot caught on; this year they were selling the bundles of sawn-off branches that they used to toss into the dumpster).

mostly it never made sense to get a tree because i was usually headed back to idaho to spend the holidays with my folks, and we’d decorate a tree there. this year i’ll be going home as usual, but work is limiting my christmas trip to a long weekend, and so i’m spending more of the christmas season in my own apartment. i thought about a tree, but as i watched the families and couples picking out trees at city lots and wrestling them on to cars or dragging them home on the CTA, i felt strongly that i didn’t want to do that alone. picking out the perfect tree, and cursing while you get it into the tree stand**, whiling away a whole winter afternoon decorating it — those are things that you do with a loved one. while this christmas season i’m trying to get used to being on my own again. so i compromised by going the hippy route: i bought a live 10″ norwegian pine that will live out its days happily in a pot (no backyard required). its branches are too delicate for ornaments, so i settled for a few white lights and some red ribbon.

i’m also struggling with learning how to cook for one. basically, it sucks. particularly since i hate leftovers. i’ve never really loved cooking, but i love eating homemade, cooked-from-scratch food. which means that i’ve had no choice but to learn how to cook for myself, since i have neither wife, mother nor live-in maid around to do it for me. in the early days, we cooked together, andy and i. we’d linger over the meal we’d made and critique it, making mental (or literal) notes for the next time, more salt, less curry, whatever. we weren’t great cooks, but it was wholesome in spirit if not body. it was just the way food is mean to be: shared. it had been months, maybe a year or more, since we’d cooked together. we’d cook for one another, but we didn’t cook together any more. perhaps it was a harbinger of our relationship’s demise.

all this makes it seem like i hardly have a reason to cook these days. but i’d just be more depressed if i ate out of a chinese takeout carton or a frozen dinner tray every night. i’d feel even more like a single, lonely cliche than i already do. so i cook. the sight of 5 stalks of broccoli at the bottom of the colandar breaks my heart just a little bit, but i cook. i tupperware leftovers and eat them for lunch the next day. when bananas go spotty and brown i bake them into bread, and bring the loaves to work where the carpenters devour them on their morning break. if i get a craving for a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie, i make a batch and then share them with the kids who live downstairs.

it’s not just food. i’ve realized that life is meant to be shared. with a partner, with friends, with family. there is no one right definition of community. but our community is what defines us. i don’t wish to be bitter and single. i will be wholesome, i will be whole again.

* i belong firmly in the anti-colored lights asthetic camp

** a family tradition, cursing the cheap plastic stand but never buying a better one