It’s funny, how the little things in my life make everything more palatable.

I remember when my child and I finally escaped the situation we were living in. We were free, we could set up our own apartment the way we wanted to, we could make the rules, we could set boundaries all by our little selves. And we did! I remember one of the things that we did that brought great joy was making paper cranes late into the night and stringing them up in the kitchen. We did not have a lot of money that year to decorate, in fact, everything in our house was hand-me-downs from my mother or purchased from the local resale store.

That Christmas was even more tight than previous years, and in searching for the perfect tree to grace our tiny one-bedroom space, I quickly realized that we were shit outta luck in finding something that fit the budget.

Not to be deterred, off to the dollar store we went, a fistful of small denomination bills in our hands.

We ended up finding a small garland, a tiny package of chrome red beads on a string, and a foam tree trunk. (Really it was just a little round of floral foam that would take brown marker nicely.) We poked a chopstick through the foam, wound the green spruce garland round it in the shape of a tree, and then strung the red beads through the branches.

“It needs something, Ma.”

Scratching my head, fiddling with my earrings, what do I say, I have a teenager who’s just been ejected from an abusive situation and the kid wants to decorate for Christmas and this crappy little tree is the best I could afford and I suck as a mother and-WAIT!

I promptly removed my earrings from my ears, and placed them on the tree.

“Ornaments!” I said, “It needs ornaments!”

Child roared with laughter, then went straight to the box where we kept the remaining stash of costume jewelry, as the real gold and silver had been sold to afford the security deposit on the apartment.

We stayed up cutting snowflakes out of old invoices and bills from our previous life, and had hot chocolate till the sun came up.

And that was one of the greatest joys of my life. I have many more, stick around to hear about them.