The Christmas Tree

EVERY year, my family heads over to Uncle Renny's house for a party that's not quite Christmas, but not quite the New Year eiter. Honestly speaking it's a boring visit, with all the grown-ups talking and talking and talking for hours on end - and recently I've also become a more worthy teenaged girl and put some mental limits on myself as to my food consumption. The only thing interesting - apart perhaps from the fact that it's a condominium apartment and we can never find a door in that doesn't require us to have a residents' card to tap - is seeing what the tree looks like this year. You see, they really doll their trees up and each year it's a different color and theme and style... It's beautiful, to use a word I normally would not use lightly, in this case in something that perhaps resembles awe. 
So there I was, sitting cross-legged on his furry off-white carpet, at the very foot of this famed tree. This year it's themed Royalty, and uses the colors red and gold - immediately summoning up foggy memories of Harry Potter in Gryffindor house. It's done up with lights that flash with varying speeds and Christmas balls that are covered in glitter of different shapes, or pieces of shiny metal that shine almost iridescent in the stylish living room. And ribbons and golden tinsel I love to pick at and rearrange restly adorn it's leaves like draped curtains in some huge and majestic castle in faraway lands. At the top, instead of a star, he's got lots of rather Chinese-looking fake branches of flowering trees with little red buds on them dusted in gold. 
I remember that last year it was a silvery tree with square blue lights and decorations of blue in all the gamut of shades it comes in. And those lights had winked like eyes and like stars in a sky.
I feel like a kid whenever I curl myself up, hugging my knees to my frame and just gazing up at it, till the very top where it almost scrapes the ceiling. It feels like a monument, perhaps not one as majestic as say the Taj Mahal, in India, but still beautiful. It seems for a moment to be a monument standing for happiness.
And that is why I go every year, and I sit my butt down on the carpet right in front of it and I ignore my mum's calls to come eat and I just sit back and stare and attempt to make a picture of this in my mind and in my heart. Because no material, physical picture could ever achieve the same thing. 
This year I heard something Uncle Renny mentioned.
He said a few hours earlier, yesterday, that he would be taking the tree down tomorrow. Today. 
Woah. 
I sat and I stared and then I shut my eyes tight, like buttons in buttonholes, tight and disciplined, and tried to recall as much of it as I could.