I’ve always had had a complicated relationship with Christmas.

I think my discomfort goes back to my earliest years and the collision between the sacred and the profane. Growing up Roman Catholic, Christmas was a deeply religious time of frequent church attendance and Christian iconography. But my family life and the larger world during the holidays were also immersed in commercialism, and I always found myself butting up against that contrast. Later on, as a public affairs writer at an ostensibly Christian hospital in Park Slope, I wrote an article for the external publication that focused on the Northern European origins of the fir tree in the Christmas tradition. The article was published, but I remember, the hospital’s executive director deemed it “paganistic.”

In my first apartment on Prospect Park West in 1976, I paid $175 a month for a one bedroom, renting it moments after finishing NYU. Despite having moved out of my parent’s distinctly Italian American home in Windsor Terrace, I still found myself somewhat wrapped up in my culture of origin. Consequently, I bought a Christmas tree, sparsely decorated it, and grooved on it as a fragrant statement of my independence. 

Somehow, in the throes of my struggle to eke out a new identity as a freelance writer, bookstore manager, and Playboy of Western Brooklyn, I never got around to taking the tree down until sometime around George Washington’s birthday. For weeks and weeks after Christmas, friends would drop by, and the artistically inclined ones were convinced that I was creating some kind of Fluxus-style artwork. Others thought I was making a statement on Christmas and commercialism; while that was perhaps closer to the truth, if so, it was completely unconscious on my part. My girlfriend at the time, on the other hand, playing with my cat, Nova (named because I adopted her the weekend of the Nova Convention, a literary event celebrating author William S. Burroughs), simply smirked and shook her head in bewilderment. 

But in fact, the tree’s continued presence in my apartment as February rolled around was largely due to sloth. Despite good intentions, my inaction piled up on itself until, at some point, it just seemed Too Damn Late to take it down. Being new to the apartment building, I was self-conscious about leaving a trail of fir needles and tinsel from my apartment, down the hall, to the elevator, down the stairs, through the lobby, to the street. What would the neighbors think? Eventually, I realized that a plan was needed. 

So, in the dead of night, I sawed the 6-foot tree apart with a serrated steak knife, like Raymond Burr did with his victim in Rear Window, while fir needles scattered about me like green-gray snowflakes. I reduced my botanical object of shame to bite size pieces, before putting it in a few black garbage bags and dumping it on the street on garbage day. 

After that, I never had a Christmas tree again.

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Anthony M Napoli is Brooklyn born and bred, and only moved up to Beacon, NY (aka “Brooklyn on the Hudson”) after retiring as a business operations manager and analyst with the NYC Department of Education.