The season was actually started by the Catholic Church some centuries ago. The term "Christmas" coming from the "Mass of Christ", supposedly a celebration of the birth of Jesus (even though He was probably born in late September or early October).

But this story is about the tree, the centerpiece of all Christianity at this time of year (although there is Scripture forbidding the putting up of a tree). I never could figure out, even as a child, what that tree had to do with what we, as little Catholics, had learned at the time.

We would go out to the ranch and chop down our tree, then bring it back to town and decorate it. Add all the shiny little things that made a tree a tree. String it with the lights and listen to my father curse under his breath in some sort of Germanic tongue. Or, perhaps, he was just mumbling. He always did enjoy the event once it was over, but the activities that preceded the sitting and looking sometimes seemed as if they were going to escort him into an early grave. (One of the reasons I found the whole affair worth participating in at times.)

Once the tree was up, we would all sit there and look at it. Older people were like that, I think. It's like the difference between TV and radio: years ago, when we didn't have TV, my father would come into the room and turn on the radio, tune in one of the two stations we could get at that time, and we would all sit right there in the living room and watch it. These days, we turn on the TV and walk around the house.

So, now the tree was up. We would sit there, on the first night, for what seemed to me to be an eternity. Just sitting there and watching it. And I noticed my brother, in what was seemingly a different light than the rest of us had shining on the tree. He seemed to be breathing in slow deep breaths. I could not imagine that tree having that much effect on anyone, but there he was, in some sort of senile rapture, watching that tree.

Later on that night, after we had gone to bed, I heard a strange noise from his room and decided to check to see if he was all right. As I stepped around the corner, I could just make out his outline on the bed from the moonlight falling through the basement window, and I felt a certain amount of shame, catching him while masturbating (something we had learned the previous summer from a neighbor boy). But being the antagonist I have always been, I could not resist blurting out, "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

Being the assertive person he has always been, he replied, "Just a minute," and continued until he was finished, then almost without even breaking stride, picked up the conversation I had started.

He asked me: had I ever really "looked" at the tree we had just decorated? I told him I had, but it never had the same effect on me as it seemed to have on him. But as he explained, the tree started to take on a different aura.

He was referring to the Christmas Balls, and there were a lot of them on that tree. "If you look at them closely," he said, "they look like tits. They are round like tits, and the spot of light that reflects on them looks like a nipple. And if you look even closer, you can see yourself in them. It's like you are up against a real big boob."

Needless to say, Christmas was never the same after that for me. And I never did look at a Christmas tree in the same light as I did before...