Five Golden Rings: A Meditation on Scratched Records, Aggressive Trees, and Christmas Traditions

The scratch happened during "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Not a minor skip—a full groove malfunction that turned Mitch Miller's already interminable carol into a form of seasonal waterboarding. "FIVE GOLDEN RINGS," the chorus would belt out with inappropriate enthusiasm, and then: "FIVE GOLDEN RINGS... FIVE GOLDEN RINGS... FIVE GOLDEN RINGS..."

Someone would have to sprint across the living room to manually advance the needle, but by then the damage was done. We'd heard "Five Golden Rings" approximately forty-seven times. My father would stare at the console stereo with the particular expression of a man questioning every decision that led to this moment. My mother would be in the kitchen, deliberately running the mixer.

This was Christmas at the Mahoney house in the 1970s: a magnificent time held together by increasingly frayed tinsel and the collective delusion that next year would be different.

It never was.

The tree situation was always its own odyssey. One year, Dad brought home what appeared to be a perfectly reasonable Douglas fir—until he got it through the door and discovered it was approximately nine feet tall. Our living room ceiling was seven and a half feet.

The solution, naturally, was to cut off the top. Then a bit more. Then a bit more. The angel that traditionally crowned our tree ended up looking like she was doing a limbo contest, bent at an anatomically improbable angle to avoid the ceiling.

But that wasn't the worst tree year.

The worst tree year was the year of the Expanding Scottish Pine. It looked modest in the lot—a nice, compact shape. The seller assured us it just needed to "drop" for a few hours after being netted. We brought it home. We put it in the stand. We cut the netting.

And then, like some nightmare from a botanical horror film, it began to expand. And expand. And expand. Branches that had been compressed for transport unfurled with what I can only describe as aggressive enthusiasm. Within three hours, we couldn't walk past it without being slapped in the face by enthusiastic pine needles. It occupied roughly one-third of our living room. Sitting on the couch meant being partially inside the tree. Presents mysteriously disappeared under the foliage.

"It's... festive," my mother said, picking needles out of her hair.

My father just stared at it, the way you'd stare at a house guest who's overstayed their welcome but you're too polite to mention it.

Then the branches started falling. Not all at once—that would have been too merciful. No, one branch every few hours, like the tree was slowly disrobing. By Christmas Eve, we had a tree that was somehow both too wide and too short, a seasonal bonsai that required you to duck while also stepping over its expanding girth.

We decorated it anyway. What else were you going to do?

The console stereo was the command center of our Christmas. A massive piece of furniture whose top had been permanently annexed as a repository for gifted bottles of alcohol that no one ever drank (though I later learned that my teenage sisters had been quietly correcting that misconception), it held stacks of records that represented the complete canon of mid-century holiday music. Bing Crosby. Dean Martin. Andy Williams crooning about it being the most wonderful time of the year, which felt like a stretch when you were on hour three of Christmas albums and someone had just knocked over the hand-crafted nutcracker.

But the Mitch Miller Christmas Sing-Along was the crown jewel of torture. That album was designed for families who genuinely enjoyed singing together, which we were not. We were a family that tolerated singing together, which is different. The album would chirp along, encouraging us to join in, and we would mumble our way through "Deck the Halls" with the enthusiasm of hostages reading a prepared statement.

And then came "The Twelve Days of Christmas."

And then came the scratch.

"FIVE GOLDEN RINGS... FIVE GOLDEN RINGS... FIVE GOLDEN—"

"I'LL GET IT!"

Someone would leap up, crash into the coffee table (because our living room was now 60% Christmas tree), and jam the needle forward. We'd miss the six geese entirely and land somewhere around eight maids a-milking, but that was fine. We'd all heard enough about those golden rings to last a lifetime.

My mother would emerge from the kitchen. "Is it stuck again?"

"It's fine," my father would say, in the tone of a man for whom nothing was fine.

The album would play on. We'd make it through "Silent Night" without incident. And then someone—usually me—would ask, "Can we play it again?"

I was not a popular child.

I discovered Santa wasn't real thanks to my brother, who delivered the news with the casual cruelty that only siblings can achieve. "You know Mom and Dad are Santa, right?" he said one afternoon, the way you might mention it's going to rain later.

I was devastated. Not because the magic was gone—I was a practical kid, and honestly, the logistics of the Santa operation had never quite added up—but because I'd been lied to. By everyone. The betrayal felt enormous.

My brother shrugged. "At least you still get presents."

This was true. And it opened up an interesting possibility.

If there was no Santa, then the presents under the tree weren't magically appearing on Christmas Eve. They were being hidden somewhere in the house right now. They could be found. They could be examined. They could be known.

I became a present-seeking missile.

The master bedroom closet was an obvious target, but my parents had anticipated this. Nothing there but boring adult clothes and a box of tax returns. The basement yielded nothing. The attic was too scary (and probably full of spiders).

But then I found it: the downstairs hall closet. The one we never used because it was full of linens and old blankets and the general detritus of family life. Hidden behind a stack of tablecloths, pushed way in the back: shopping bags. Lots of shopping bags.

I was so careful. I didn't tear anything. I just peeked. Just a little look. Just enough to confirm what I was getting.

And reader, I was getting exactly what I wanted.

The relief was enormous. The anticipation was gone, replaced by certainty. Christmas morning would bring no surprises, but it would bring no disappointments either. I'd gamed the system.

Except.

What I hadn't anticipated was that knowing what you're getting doesn't feel like winning. It feels like you've stolen something from yourself. Christmas morning came, and I unwrapped my presents with what I hoped looked like genuine surprise. "Oh wow! This is great! Just what I wanted!"

My mother looked at me with the particular expression of a parent who knows exactly what you've been up to but is choosing to let it slide because it's Christmas.

I'd ruined my own surprise. The gift was perfect. The moment was hollow.

I vowed never to peek again.

I peeked again the next year.

But Christmas morning itself—that was still magic, even when you'd spoiled half of it for yourself. Five kids, ranging from teenager to elementary school, descending on the living room like a very cheerful plague. Wrapping paper everywhere, a blizzard of ribbons and bows and those weird curly things you made with scissors that nobody's been able to successfully replicate since 1983.

My father would be in charge of garbage bag duty, trying to maintain some semblance of order while we tore through presents like tiny, festive tornadoes. My mother would be taking pictures, the flash going off every thirty seconds, documenting the chaos for posterity.

We'd compare gifts. Trade. Argue over whose stocking was better (mine was always best, obviously). The dog would be frantically eating discarded ribbon, which would lead to an interesting veterinary situation three days later. Someone would step on a Lego approximately forty-five seconds after unwrapping it.

It was bedlam. It was perfect.

And then, as the wrapping paper settled and we started to drift toward the kitchen for the cinnamon rolls my mother made every Christmas morning, she went still.

"Wait," she said.

We waited. My mother's "wait" voice had several settings, ranging from "I forgot to add salt to something" to "the house is actively on fire." This was somewhere in the middle, trending toward concerning.

"Honey," she said to my eldest sister, "what did you get?"

My sister looked confused. "Uh... this sweater, and the books, and the record—"

"What else?"

"That's... that's it, I think?"

My mother's face did something complicated. She started scanning the floor, looking at the piles of opened presents, the scattered gift tags, the sea of wrapping paper.

"The earrings," she said quietly.

"What earrings?" my sister asked.

And just like that, the morning shifted.

The earrings were not just earrings. They were the earrings—a pair that had belonged to our great-grandmother, passed down through the family, held in trust until my sister was old enough to have them. My mother had wrapped them carefully, hidden them with the other gifts, placed them under the tree.

They were somewhere in this room.

Or they were supposed to be.

My father, demonstrating the leadership skills that had served him well in his career, immediately organized us into search teams. "Check your piles. Check under the couch. Check everywhere."

We checked everywhere.

Nothing.

"Maybe they're still upstairs?" my father suggested. "In the closet?"

My mother was already moving, taking the stairs two at a time. We heard her in the bedroom, heard the closet door open, heard the distinctive sound of someone moving boxes around with increasing urgency.

She came back down shaking her head.

"Okay," my father said, in the voice of a man trying to remain calm while everything falls apart. "Let's think about this logically. When did you last see them?"

"Last night. I put them under the tree before bed."

"So they have to be here."

We searched again. We checked under furniture. We checked inside other presents—maybe they'd gotten mixed up? We checked the tree itself—maybe they'd fallen and gotten caught in the branches?

Nothing.

And then my father said the thing nobody wanted to hear: "Check the trash."

If you've never experienced the particular humiliation of standing in your driveway in your pajamas on Christmas morning, elbow-deep in a garbage can full of wet wrapping paper while your neighbors drive by on their way to church, let me assure you: it is clarifying.

Christmas Archaeology at its finest.

All seven of us were out there. Even the dog was helping, though her contribution was mostly enthusiastic and counterproductive. We pulled out every piece of wrapping paper, unfolded every crumpled gift bag, checked every box.

My mother was near tears. My father had the grim expression of a man conducting a military operation under adverse conditions. My siblings were cold, cranky, and starting to turn on each other.

"Maybe you threw them away," one sibling said to another.

"I didn't throw away anything. You're the one who was cramming stuff in the bag—"

"I was helping—"

"Kids," my father said wearily. "Not now."

I was standing to the side, watching this unfold, and feeling the weight of knowledge pressing down on me like a physical thing.

I knew where the earrings were.

I'd seen them. Three days ago, during one of my reconnaissance missions to the downstairs hall closet. A small wrapped box, flat and elegant, with my sister's name on it. I'd picked it up, felt its weight, put it back carefully.

And apparently, in the chaos of Christmas Eve—in the last-minute wrapping and hiding and arranging—it had never made it out of the closet.

But telling my mother this meant admitting I'd been peeking. It meant confessing to the crime I'd been committing all season. It meant getting in trouble on Christmas.

I looked at my mother's face. At the garbage can. At my siblings, cold and miserable.

I moved closer to her and whispered: "I think they might be in the downstairs hall closet."

She turned to look at me. Really look at me.

"The downstairs closet," I repeated quietly. "Behind the tablecloths."

There was a very long moment where I watched several emotions cross her face: confusion, realization, relief, exasperation, and something that might have been amusement.

She didn't say anything. She just went inside.

Thirty seconds later, we heard her: "FOUND THEM!"

My siblings stampeded back into the house, leaving me and my father standing by the garbage cans. He looked at me. I looked at the ground.

"You've been peeking," he said.

It wasn't a question.

"Yeah."

"You know that's not—"

"I know."

He sighed. Put a hand on my shoulder. "You saved Christmas, though."

"Am I in trouble?"

"Oh, absolutely," he said. "But not today."

We went back inside. My mother was hugging my sister, who was crying over the earrings, which were indeed beautiful—delicate gold with tiny pearls. The kind of thing that made you understand why people pass jewelry down through generations.

My mother caught my eye across the room. Mouthed "thank you."

Then pointed upstairs.

I was grounded for a week starting December 26th. Totally worth it.

Later that afternoon, after church, after the cinnamon rolls, after my sister had put on the earrings and declared she'd never take them off (a promise she kept for approximately four hours), we settled in for the traditional Christmas movie marathon.

Rudolph first, obviously. The stop-motion animation that had terrified and delighted us in equal measure since we were tiny. Then Frosty, with his inevitable melting that made my youngest sister cry every single year, even though she knew it was coming and that he'd be fine in the end.

The Mitch Miller album played in the background, because apparently we were gluttons for punishment. When it got to "The Twelve Days of Christmas," we all tensed, waiting for the scratch.

"FIVE GOLDEN RINGS... FIVE GOLDEN RINGS..."

My father leapt up, knocked over a bowl of popcorn, crashed into what remained of the Christmas tree (two more branches fell), and advanced the needle.

We landed on "ten lords a-leaping."

"Close enough," he muttered.

My mother, from the kitchen: "Is it stuck again?"

"It's FINE."

It wasn't fine. Nothing was fine. The tree was half-defoliated. We'd spent an hour digging through garbage. The dog had eaten something she shouldn't have and was making concerning noises. My father had popcorn in his hair. The house smelled like pine needles and cinnamon and wet dog.

But we were together. All of us, in our living room, in our too-small house with our too-wide tree and our broken record and our family heirlooms that almost ended up in the trash.

My sister caught me looking at her earrings.

"Thanks for finding these," she said quietly.

"You're welcome," I said.

"You're still a little sneak."

"I know."

She smiled. "At least you're a useful little sneak."

From the stereo, Mitch Miller was encouraging us to deck the halls. My father had fallen asleep on the couch, still wearing his pajamas at 3 PM. My mother was in the kitchen, probably making something that would take three hours and use every dish we owned. My siblings were arguing over what movie to watch next.

Outside, it started to snow.

Not a lot. Not a white Christmas, exactly. But enough to make everything look clean and soft and possible. Enough to make you believe that next year—next year—we'd get it all right. The tree would be the perfect size. The record wouldn't skip. No one would lose any family heirlooms.

Somewhere, Mitch Miller launched into "The Twelve Days of Christmas."

We all held our breath.

"FIVE GOLDEN RINGS... FIVE GOLDEN RINGS..."

My mother emerged from the kitchen, wooden spoon in hand.

My father opened one eye.

"Don't," he said. "Don't you dare."

I was already moving toward the stereo.

Some traditions, I suppose, are worth keeping.