As I took the decorations off my artificial Christmas tree and put them away, I found myself mulling over new year’s resolutions… Carefully handling each branch, I snipped away at the wires and started feeling for this tree. With each snip and painstaking unwinding, I recognised that I was releasing the tree from the bondage of appearance and glitter.

As an Anishinaabekwe, I am most at home among my mitig (tree) relatives. So when one is brought into my home, I feel like I’m welcoming family. I live by the beliefs and values that I’ve been taught: that I have a relationship with everything around me — the flying beings, the growing beings, the swimming beings, the four-legged beings and the rooted beings.