My family had one plastic tree for twenty or more Christmases. It was a well-constructed one, a bare metal trunk with two or three hoops to hook in each individual branch around the tree. It actually came with an instruction manual. Our Christmas tree and boxes of ornaments occupied several boxes in the basement; the annual production of “putting up the tree” was my introduction to grown-ups without the memory skills to recall from one year to the next the locations of things they put away in the same box in the same place every year. And now I am that grown-up.

The only part of the decoration process that I ever relaxed and enjoyed was the practice of throwing tinsel everywhere—on the tree and near the tree—and the tradition of placing the angel on top. (That is an unsung rite of passage, the moment the family notices one is tall enough to top the tree with a star or angel.)

One of my family’s angels was a seraph whose robe was a cardboard skirt with one staple to hold it in a fluted tube shape and with glued-on glitter that had started to peel off and thin, stringy blonde hair, like a combover. Its halo was glitter glued in a circle on that hair, as well; it was not even on a wire that held it above her head. It was a broken angel. But you see it was our angel, the one my sister and I thought of as ours for some reason, and when nicer, more expensive-looking, gilded angels with a halo on a wire found their way into our house, they were always relegated to lower branches. Our comb over angel always sat on top.

My family’s philosophy that one always roots for the underdog extended to angels.

That perspective may be the best, the longest lasting, gift I received from my family.