By JEFF MINICK
It was about a week before Christmas when I saw them, a half-dozen tiny insects holding a convention on the carpet near the porch door of my second-story apartment. I produced my magnifying glass, studied them, and was unhappy with the results.
Baby stink bugs.
For those unfamiliar with those insects entomologists classify as halyomorpha halys and the hoi polloi call stink bugs, let me offer some information. Stink bugs were accidentally introduced to the United States around 1998, possibly arriving with some freight from China. They can destroy crops. The dumbest and most inept of all insects, they lack the agility and speed of roaches, the cunning of ants, and the aeronautical talents of the common housefly.
Once indoors, stink bugs buzz clumsily around the lights at night or sit on a desktop as if waiting to be crushed.
They have only one real defense.
They stink. Crush them and a bitter smell, a little like coriander, permeates the air.
I swept those little invaders into a dustpan and pitched from the porch, but the war was only beginning. The next day, I found another platoon of them camped out by the foot of the sofa.
This foray drove me to more aggressive action. After casting those miscreants to the wind, I laid double-sided tape in front of various doorways; I pulled bookshelves from the wall and cleaned the floors behind them; I sprayed stink bug repellent around my exterior doorways and windows.
All to no avail.
Every day those little critters kept appearing, stink bug toddlers who had apparently decided to make my apartment their nursery. Every day I swept them up and tossed them outside into the cold — twenty, thirty, forty of them at a time — but their numbers seemed inexhaustible.
Then came Christmas morning. My youngest son and I had attended Midnight Mass and would later join some of my other children and grandchildren for a Christmas feast, but it was just the two of us together that morning. As we unwrapped our gifts, I sipped my coffee and admired our tree, a Frasier fir we’d bought at the Farmer’s Market, full and deeply green, decked out in the lights and ornaments collected over the years by my wife before her untimely death.
The last gift was mine to open, a bag with bright red tissue paper on top. When I pulled out the wrapping paper and the present, I saw three tiny stink bugs trotting around the bottom of the bag. That was my light bulb moment, the instant when I knew where I would find the base camp of our invaders. I retrieved that magnifying glass, examined the branches of our beautiful tree, and found those branches garlanded with hundreds and hundreds of miniature stink bugs.
In less than half an hour, we had stripped the tree of its ornaments and lights, removed the angel from the top bough, lugged the tree through the door and onto the porch, and heaved it into the yard below, where its crash landing doubtless tumbled stink bugs all over the winter lawn. By 11 a.m. on Christmas morning, I was dragging the tree to the street, no doubt appearing to all of Cumberland Avenue like Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch rolled into one horrible, Christmas-hating curmudgeon.
Losing that tree angered me. We had always kept our tree up well past Epiphany, the green boughs a splendid antidote to winter’s gloom, the fragrance filling the apartment as it had once filled our house when my wife still lived. Now I was standing in the living room with pine sap on my fingers and with strings of lights, colored balls, and various ornaments scattered across the floor among wrapping paper and opened boxes.
Eventually, I knew, this whole episode would seem comical, a humorous story to tell to friends and family, but at the moment all I felt was anger over the infested fir and sadness at the sight of my wife’s ornaments looking so forlorn on the carpet.
I was heading for the kitchen to grab another cup of coffee before cleaning up the mess when I passed the crèche. I paused and looked at it. The crèche was sitting where it always does at Christmas, atop the barrister bookcase my wife had given me long ago. Like the ornaments, the dozens of figures surrounding the Baby Jesus — Mary, Joseph, angels, shepherds, wise men, townspeople — were lovingly collected over the years by Kris.
In that moment my anger and disappointment disappeared.
I remembered that Christmas wasn’t about trees or gifts, ornaments or stockings. Christmas was about love.
It was about the love my children and I shared. It was about my love for my wife, my children’s love for their mother, and the mystical comforts brought by our belief in the communion of the saints.
Christmas, I thought as I looked at that crèche, was about the love of the God-Man who had come to Earth and cracked history and time in half. It was about the Son of God lying in a manger as a newborn, bringing mercy and love to a broken world. It was about the love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit for every human soul, rich man and beggar, saint and sinner, man and woman, young and old, all of us.
That moment transformed my Christmas Day. It allowed me to cut past the holiday trappings, all those things that are extraneous to this holy day, and enter into the heart of Christmas.
As for the stink bugs, I suppose I should be grateful to those putrid pests for reminding me of the true meaning of our celebration.
Maybe so. But I’m still taking that magnifying glass with me when I buy my Christmas trees.
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