My old Christmas tree — the very one I bought years ago at a Hangzhou super-market — was the last thing I expect-ed to find in my in--laws’ storage room in their rural Zhejiang home.

My husband Jun and I had just moved back to China after spend-ing years in the United States, my home country. We had decided to stay at the family home during our transition back to life in China, which just happened to overlap with the start of the Christmas sea-son.

While I recognized we probably couldn’t “deck the halls” with the same flair as my family had done in the US, I still longed for that one holiday necessity — a Christmas tree.

The last time we had owned an artificial tree in China, we lived in a small apartment in Shanghai, where it always occupied a place of importance in our living room every Christmas. But before mov-ing to the US, we had left the tree behind with Jun’s family, like many other possessions we could never have packed because of the limited space in our luggage.

I knew his parents, frugal by nature, cherished the many practi-cal household items we had passed on to them. Yet, if there was one thing I felt certain they had already jettisoned from our Shang-hai days, it was the old Christmas tree. After all, they hadn’t grown up celebrating the holiday, and I had never glimpsed a single Christmas decoration in their rural home.

Why would they hold onto something that ostensibly had no obvious place or purpose in their rural Chinese lives?

So after moving back to China, when I brought up with my hus-band the idea of having a Christ-mas tree, I had assumed it would lead to talk of taking the bus to the largest supermarket in the county, sure to have a corner dressed in tinsel, filled with everything from rosy--cheeked plastic Santas to arti-ficial evergreens of all sizes cov-ered in shiny baubles and lights.

Instead, hours later, my husband poked his head into the bedroom, to bring great news of a package he and his parents had pulled out of one of the storage rooms: my old Christmas tree.

I bolted downstairs with all the excitement of a little girl on the morning of Dec 25, and found my beloved tree wrapped up in crin-kled plastic. Opening it delivered even more thrills — nestled inside the faux branches were my old ornaments, including many I thought of as keepsakes, and a string of electric lights that still glowed in a rainbow of colors.

Hours later, after setting up the tree in a corner of the dining room, I still marveled at how my in--laws had stored it all these years.

Contact the writer at jocelyn@chinadaily.com.cn