The Christmas that went wrong: My grandma was so shocked by our tree that she destroyed it
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On seeing it in the dark, my Vietnamese grandmother was convinced it was Buddha himself – and that she had died and passed into the afterlife. When my cousins and I were young, we built a makeshift Christmas tree in our grandma’s basement garage. Christmas was a relatively new celebration for our family: my parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles had arrived in Australia as refugees from Vietnam in the late 1970s and, as Buddhists, didn’t celebrate Christmas – until young children came along.
So, our tree was fashioned out of cardboard tubes – the kind that hold bolts of fabric, since our family was in the textiles business. The base was a plastic bucket; the body was three of those slender cardboard cylinders, tipi-ed together and tied at the top. We draped it in tinsel and crowned it with a star. It was a thing of beauty, one-and-a-half metres high with a slightly musty aroma.
One December evening, the ersatz tree was the centrepiece for our Christmas “photo booth”. A cousin was delegated the role of Santa. Another was an elf. We took turns posing with our festive tableau. When it was time to go home, we left the tree intact for another day of play and switched off the lights.
A few days later, we found out the Christmas tree had been urgently dismantled. One evening, Bà Nội – my paternal grandmother – had walked into the basement and got the shock of her life. She was momentarily convinced, thanks to the tinsel twinkling in the dark, that the Christmas tree was Buddha himself – and that she had died and passed into the afterlife.
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