Winter's Branches

"You remember them, don't you, Tanner?" Lieutenant Daniella's voice was a low murmur, cutting through the insistent hum of the portable generator outside their cramped, insulated tent. She gestured with a mittened hand towards the spindly fir that someone, Private Lysenko, if I recalled correctly, had dragged in from the nearest patch of sparse taiga. It stood, shivering faintly in the draught, a testament less to festive spirit and more to sheer, stubborn will.

I took a slow sip from my mug, the lukewarm, slightly metallic taste of the rations tea doing little to warm the chill that seemed to emanate from the very walls of our temporary quarters. "Indeed, Lieutenant. The memory of those boughs, laden with familial adornment, persists with an almost startling clarity, does it not? A stark contrast to our present, rather spartan, evergreen." My gaze drifted to the tree, then to the condensation forming delicate, crystalline patterns on the metal sheeting above us. The surreal quality of my reply felt apt; nothing here felt entirely real, save the gnawing cold.

"Spartan is generous, Captain. It's… a brave effort. Like a child's drawing attempting to capture the aurora borealis with a handful of broken crayons." Daniella allowed herself a faint, almost imperceptible smile. Her breath misted in the cooler air near the tent flap, a transient cloud against the drab olive of her parka. "But it brought them, didn't it? The ghosts of Christmases past." She turned to face me fully, her eyes, usually sharp and analytical, held a peculiar, soft lustre.

"They always arrive, Lieutenant, unbidden. Especially when the world outside offers so little in the way of succour." I set my mug down on the rough-hewn table. The wood felt cold, damp against my palm. My fingers twitched, a phantom sensation of rough pine needles. "I remember the one from my eighth year. Grand, truly. Not merely tall, but wide, its branches stretching like welcoming arms. My father, bless his stubborn heart, insisted on felling it himself, despite the frostbite risk. He returned, beard iced, triumph in his eyes, smelling of pine resin and exertion."

A strange shimmer seemed to pass over the tent's interior as I spoke, the flickering fluorescent tubes overhead momentarily dimming, then returning with a renewed, almost painful brightness. Or perhaps it was merely my own vision, recalibrating. The canvas walls seemed to recede, replaced by the warm, patterned wallpaper of my childhood home. The air filled with the phantom scent of roasting duck, cinnamon, and the sharp, clean aroma of fresh pine, so potent it pricked at the back of my throat. It was not a memory I simply recalled; it was a scene I walked within.

My mother, a vision of calm amidst the joyous chaos, would direct the placement of each ornament with a precision usually reserved for military strategy. The lights, hundreds of them, tiny coloured globes, seemed to possess a life of their own, each one a miniature sun, burning through the winter gloom. I recall one specific ornament: a tiny, hand-painted wooden soldier, no bigger than my thumb, his uniform chipped, his bayonet slightly bent. I had always imagined him as the guardian of the tree, silent and vigilant, much like us now, I supposed, albeit for a different kind of forest.

I remembered the exact weight of the glass baubles in my small hands, cold and smooth, reflecting my wide, eager face back at me in distorted miniature. The sheer abundance of it all. Ribbons of deep crimson and emerald green cascading down the dark green branches. My younger sister, Oksana, giggling as she tangled herself in a string of tinsel, emerging like a shimmering, silver-clad sprite. The laughter, a genuine, unburdened sound, echoed in my memory, a sound so utterly alien to this place that it made my chest ache with a quiet, profound ache.

"The lights," Daniella said, her voice pulling me gently back from the edge of that vibrant recollection, though the scent of pine still lingered, a stubborn ghost. "They're always the core, aren't they? The colour, the warmth. I remember a much simpler tree, Captain. After I'd left home, first year at the academy. A small, potted sapling in my tiny, rented room off base. No family. No feast. Just… the silence."

A Different Glow

Her words hung in the air, a different kind of quiet. I listened, the generator's drone now sounding like a far-off ocean, washing against the shores of her narrative. "I had bought a single strand of ten yellow lights," she continued, her voice gaining a formal, almost narrative cadence. "The cheapest I could find. And a handful of paper stars I'd cut from old maps. It was pathetic, truly. The room was freezing, the heating barely functioning, and the window overlooking a grey, slush-filled alley. My uniform hung stiffly on a coat rack, a constant reminder of the austere path I had chosen."

The way she described it, I could almost feel the chill seeping through the thin walls of that room, taste the loneliness that must have settled around her like a shroud. The surreal quality of the present seeped into her past, making her recollections feel almost cinematic, the colours muted, the sound of the slush outside unnaturally clear. I imagined the tiny yellow lights, not as cheerful, but as desperate beacons against a profound, personal darkness.

"I had a textbook open, trying to make sense of tactical manoeuvres for an examination the next day," Daniella continued, her gaze fixed on the anemic fir, as if projecting her own history onto its barren branches. "But I kept looking at that tree. Those ten small lights. They weren't grand, they weren't abundant. But they were mine. And they glowed. A faint, persistent warmth against the overwhelming cold. A promise, perhaps, that even in isolation, even in the bleakest of winters, a small, chosen light could still exist. A form of defiance, really."

She paused, her eyes seeming to pierce through the tent canvas, out into the endless, snow-laden landscape. "It was then I understood, I believe, the enduring power of these rituals. Not for the joy, necessarily, nor the family, though those are precious. But for the sheer obstinacy of hope. A small, burning ember against the frost that seeks to extinguish everything."

Her honesty, delivered with such elegant, measured precision, resonated. The small, plain fir in the corner of our tent seemed to straighten, its meagre branches imbued with a new purpose. It was no longer just a struggling plant; it was a canvas, awaiting the projections of our collective longing. The generator outside vibrated with a deeper rumble, and I felt a faint, almost imperceptible tremor in the floor beneath my heavy boots. The world outside was an indifferent, hostile entity, but within these thin walls, something fragile yet potent was being conjured.

"Obstinacy of hope," I repeated, letting the words settle on my tongue. "A fine phrase, Lieutenant. A concept often more valuable than any tactical advantage, I daresay." I stood, stretching the stiffness from my back, my joints protesting the cold. "Perhaps we should offer this particular specimen a little of that obstinate hope. Do we possess any… suitable accoutrements? Anything to alleviate its current, rather melancholic disposition?"

Daniella's smile returned, this time more pronounced, a genuine softening of her usual guarded expression. "Private Lysenko, in his enthusiasm, managed to acquire a single string of… rather robust LED lights. Multicoloured, to boot. And I believe there were some spare lengths of signal cable, repurposed, naturally, into a rather fetching silver tinsel."

A Fragile Adornment

We approached the tree. Its scent, faint and slightly resinous, mingled with the lingering metal tang in the air. The LED lights, when I took them from Daniella, felt surprisingly heavy, the plastic casings cold against my fingers. They were not delicate, intricate things from a department store, but industrial-strength, designed for durability rather than aesthetic pleasure. Their colours, when I plugged them into a spare outlet, were brutally bright: a shocking electric blue, a violent magenta, a stark emerald green. They pulsed with an almost aggressive cheerfulness, completely at odds with the subdued, grey world outside.

As I began to string them, carefully, around the sparse branches, the colours flared, casting strange, shifting hues across the tent walls. The blue light made the metal sheeting seem like an impossible ice cave, while the magenta rendered Daniella's face in an unsettling, theatrical glow. It was a surreal transformation, the mundane tent becoming a canvas for these raw, untamed colours. Each deliberate movement felt charged, imbued with a significance beyond simply decorating a tree.

I worked in silence, my mind drifting, skipping between the present and the past. The robust, almost brutal brightness of these lights brought forth another memory, one less gentle. A Christmas Eve during my first deployment, a hastily strung string of bare, exposed bulbs in a crumbling bunker. The lights had flickered, died, then sparked back to life, the brief darkness an oppressive reminder of their precarious existence. The smell then had been not of pine, but of burning copper and wet concrete, a sharp, acrid scent that still, at times, surprised me in the dead of night. Yet even then, in that grim place, those sputtering lights had held a strange, desperate beauty, a collective gasp against the encroaching night.

"The signal cable, Captain," Daniella prompted, holding out a coil of thin, silvery wire. It felt surprisingly light, almost weightless, a stark contrast to the thick, cumbersome cables I was used to handling in the field. We began to drape it over the branches, the metallic sheen catching the fierce, artificial glow of the LEDs. Each strand we added seemed to multiply the light, refracting it, scattering it into a thousand tiny, distorted reflections on the cold metal walls.

My hands, scarred and calloused from years of service, moved with an unexpected tenderness as I adjusted a section of cable, allowing it to fall just so. The act was a strange comfort, a small defiance against the larger, more chaotic forces that governed our lives here. I saw my reflection in a particularly shiny section of the cable – a man older than I felt, my eyes deep-set, the faint lines around them etched by wind and worry. But in the reflected light, there was also a glint of something else, something resilient, unyielding.

The conversation, when it resumed, was more punctuated by silences, by shared glances that conveyed more than words. Daniella spoke of a childhood fascination with how light seemed to transform everything, how a simple bulb could turn a mundane room into a realm of wonder. Her words, though formal, were imbued with a childlike earnestness that was rare to witness from her. We discussed the specific shades of green, how the vibrant emerald of the LEDs was so different from the deep, rich forest greens of memory, and how the harsh blue felt like something from another world entirely.

This was not merely decoration; it was an act of reclamation. Each strand of light, each piece of repurposed cable, was a small victory against the overwhelming greyness, the ceaseless cold. The surreal effect of the clashing lights, the harsh environment, and the tender memories created a potent, almost dizzying cocktail of emotions. It was as if the tent itself was breathing, expanding and contracting with our shared recollections, the air thick with unspoken yearning.

We finished. The small fir, still spindly, still awkward, now pulsed with an almost aggressive life. The multi-coloured LEDs hummed faintly, their un-natural brightness a stark, almost violent assertion of joy against the bleakness. It was not a beautiful tree in any traditional sense. It was raw, unpolished, a little lopsided. But it was ours. And it shone.

"It is… transformative," Daniella finally observed, stepping back to take in our creation. Her tone was one of genuine surprise, a rare crack in her carefully constructed composure. "The essence of the season, perhaps, captured not in elegance, but in sheer, unvarnished will."

I nodded, a profound sense of peace settling over me, a feeling as unexpected as it was welcome. The scent of pine, once a ghost, now seemed to deepen, mingling with the static tang of the LEDs and the faint, cold scent of the snow that pressed against the tent walls. The colours seemed to shift and dance, creating fleeting, vibrant illusions against the drab canvas, making the familiar space feel alien, sacred. We had not merely decorated a tree; we had, for a moment, bent reality to our will, creating a small, glowing pocket of the impossible.

I looked at the small, fragile tree, its borrowed lights a defiant splash against the endless, swallowing dark. What new year would these branches witness? What distant star would guide us home, if indeed there was still a home to return to?