From the Top by Michael Perry

all three of them are looking at me with blue eyes and smiles, the tree settled on the sled between them.
    We brought the tree inside and spent the evening stringing popcorn beside the fire and letting the girls take turns hanging ornaments. Later, when Anneliese was putting Jane to bed, I was in the kitchen doing dishes when I noticed the living room lights go out. I looked, and there was Amy sitting sideways in the old overstuffed chair, legs dangling, staring at the lit tree in the dark. You want, in moments like these, to just shut the world down and call it a day. And when I pulled that dishwater drain, that’s exactly what I did: went in and sat with her.
    That tree was a spruce, short and a tad gappy, although nowhere near Charlie Brown status. But it looked perfectly beautiful glowing in the corner that evening. I got to thinking about how long I’d held out against getting a Christmas tree, and how the kids coming along changed things, and what lesson I might takefrom that. And I believe those first Christmas trees taught me that sometimes you need to stop being the man you think you are, and start being the man you oughta be.
    Merry Christmas.
NEVERENDING NEW YEAR
    The older I grow, the less I’m interested in celebrating Official New Year’s. Oh, I don’t mind a get-together if it’s with good friends and convenient, but by and large I prefer celebrating any given Tuesday.
    For a few years in my early teens we spent New Year’s Eve at Grandma Perry’s house. Grandma was overgenerous, and by the time New Year’s rolled around, we kids were saturated with store-bought gifts, store-bought peanut brittle, store-bought angel food candy, and store-bought stuff in general. Being raised on homemade and hand-me-downs, my brothers and sisters and I had an uncritical appetite for all things store-bought and didn’t feel slighted in the least that our grandma was not a homebaked-sugar-cookies kind of grandma. Besides, when she did do her once-a-year Christmas baking—mainly those red and green spritz cookies manufactured by a process of cold extrusion using a device similar to a caulking gun—they always tasted of Carlton 100 smoke, which had of course been kneaded into the dough with love. With Grandma you didn’t just breathe her secondhand smoke, you ate it too.
    So New Year’s Eve would arrive, and by a quarter of midnight the rest of the family would be gone abed and it was just me in Grandma’s living room, and I’d be coming down off a sustained sugar high, modulating ever so preciously into the spun sugar haze of teen angst as I sat there in my feathered hair and new velour shirt gazing out Grandma’s picture window at the red light of a radio tower blinking softly atop a hill just up the road.
    Grandma had a bookshelf clock that chimed on the hour and half-hour, and it seemed to me the tick-tock of that clock was carefully timed to the backbeat of the pulsing red light on the hill, and as the seconds ticked their way toward midnight I found my entire being suffused with an impossible nostalgia as—at fourteen, or whatever—I sensed the implacable passage of time and the looming finality of life, or at least this year’s peanut brittle.
    When the clock rang midnight, I felt as if I were floating out above the reverberant chasm of an unknown future.
    As you can see, I was a very poetic sort of youth. On the inside, anyway.
    Probably my favorite New Year’s ever was the one I spent with the New Auburn Area Fire Department on the evening of December 31, 1999—eve of the much dreaded Y2K. We were all ready down there at the hall, although we weren’t clear on how we might prevent the collapse of civilized society with two pike poles, five yellow fire trucks, and several sheets of Stop, Drop, and Roll stickers. In the end we just watched Tommy Boy and ate a tankerload of Lil’ Smokies. By half past midnight the lights were still