On Friday, Compass High hosted its holiday show. It’s a tiny school, student body of 41. You’d think it impossible to put together a band, a drama society and a glee club, but Ms. Ballard convinced these young men and women who learn differently to get together and make something beautiful.

My son Aidan does not perform. Last year, when enrolled in theater class, he told Ms. Ballard that he would take an F rather than step into the limelight. So, she made him the stage crew. Turns out he has a great dexterity for moving lights, microphones and props (theater shorthand for properties). This December, she voluntold him he’d do it again.

The theater on the Notre Dame de Namur campus seats maybe 40 people. As the band launched into “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” I sat in the third row and maybe cried a little.

Sometimes I just want to feel sad at Christmas. My husband Brian and I have watched our sons (Zane and Aidan) in holiday spectacles for 16 years: the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy Winter Festival and Saint John School Christmas pageant, with the kindergarteners playing out the nativity scene. But this would be the very last one.

Aidan wasn’t having any of my sentimentality. “Dad, there will be a holiday show at the college I go to next year. Or the trade school. And if they don’t, I’m pretty sure Zane’s gonna make you a grandfather sooner rather than later.”

“Bite your tongue!” I said.

But Aidan was right. Why fret about endings when there are beginnings all around? And there are plenty of other events that have always been and will always be.

Like the ornament party.

It’s a pagan tradition that we Americans have adopted. Somewhere in what is now Germany, people decorated trees with apples to celebrate the solstice. Centuries later, Hans Greiner, a glassblower, figured it would be better to blow apples rather than grow them. They also lasted longer, and so an industry was born.

In my youth in South Ozone Park, there were a lot of plastic and aluminum trees. The neighbors helped each other assemble their trees and enjoyed had maybe a highball or Rheingold beer, while the boys traded candy canes and carved reindeer.

We had the complicated kind of artificial tree, with branches that were color coded and had to screw into matching holes on what looked like a green broomstick. And we were the neighbors’ last stop on the block, so ours was always a little crooked, with branches at the wrong angles and the tinsel hanging in clumps.

Fifty years later, in the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior, that tradition translates to our friends and neighbors visiting us on the Sunday before Christmas Eve, each bringing an ornament to hang on the tree on our porch.

It's the one time of year we actually clean the Bedlam Blue Bungalow. Zane knows to be home. Aidan comes out of his room. Brian lights the Christmas village.

We mull wine and cider with cloves and star anise. We serve cheese and crackers and Nurse Vivian’s famous pigs in a blanket. Crazy Mike brings rumaki (water chestnuts wrapped in bacon, another San Francisco invention). At some point, Uncle Quentin sits down at the piano, and for a while it looks a whole lot like a Norman Rockwell illustration.

And when the last carol is sung, as the guests leave, they each take a lace cherub or a CVS soldier off the tree, so that our holiday is part of their holiday, and their holiday is part of ours.

Took me a few years to figure out how the market worked for this redistribution. Our extended family is pretty eclectic, so we find dreidels, red envelopes and kinaras on the tree. Some friends make origami swans or hand-painted snowflakes. But as is human nature, the nice crystal ballerinas and needlepoint stars go to their new homes quickly. What tends to remain are popsicle-stick sleds and ceramic piranhas.

This is what the solstice is about. Not so much the sublime as the humble. But we love the homeliest of trinkets because they were gifted out of kindness. Give me the bells made out of macaroni and the clothes-pin angels.

We humans are not perfect, least of all the Fisher-Paulsons. But it is our flaws that make us loveable. We sent out a holiday card, and in the family photo, no one’s hair was combed or cut. Because that is who we are. As we near the longest night of the year, we acknowledge that it is the shadows that define us.

May your holidays be filled with Norman Rockwell moments. But also, may your tree be lopsi