The best thing about decorating the house for the holidays is unpacking my ornaments and distributing them through as many rooms as possible. Doug helps me carry all the boxes up from the basement, and as I open them I lift out every Christmases I ever had. Which at this point is a lot of Christmases. It’s true I don’t possess actual pieces from my childhood any more, but those from my children’s childhood recall my own to me. The stars made of bread-dough clay, flowers of cornstarch clay, and god’s eyes of yarn, emerge from their careful tissue wrappings as though in a sparkling blaze, and light up the winter day. I put on Christmas music, sing along, pour myself some eggnog, and restore the ornaments to the season they were made for.
I used to make these yarn angels – it’s why I taught my daughter to make them. My children, grown now, refer to these ornaments as my Holy Relics. I hang them alongside store-bought travel souvenirs and gifts from a lifetime of friends. Every year an ornament or two breaks, or falls, or in some other way meets the end of its useful life, and every year I make something new and add it to the tree.
Recently a friend gave me a stack of books she cleaned out of her house. There was a whole set of encyclopedias and an array of books she had once used teaching English in Poland, including dictionaries and songbooks. The pages of the songbooks were large and inspiring, meant as they were for lifting voices out of paper and ink. Pretty miraculous. I couldn’t read them, but I thought they made a glorious wreath.
The encyclopedia was in English, so I can tell you the pages that made this wreath were full of Billiards and Bergamot, among other Volume Two subjects.
My new tree ornaments this year were also made of paper, this time Japanese origami paper. Another friend showed me how to fold it into pairs of flower petals, which were then glued together to make a circle. To hold the pieces together while the glue dried, I used the miniature clothespins my Dad used as clamps when he made ship models. My children, my parents, countries I have learned from, countries I have traveled to, all these cultures and all these generations fill the branches of my tree. Multiculturalism is out of fashion these days, but it’s beautiful and memorable in my living room, here at the time of year when the light prepares to come back.
Thanksgiving marks the pivot point between fall and winter. The leaves are all down, Christmas lights have begun going up, and a bit of snow has joined in the decorating trend. One of my surprises moving to Michigan from California, was still having fresh sage in the garden for the Thanksgiving turkey platter. I did have to brush the snow off of it, but it looked great and smelled wonderful.
The turkey platter is a family heirloom. I didn’t have the best relationship with my mother growing up, but as I set the table it meant a lot to me to have her silver, her black glass candlesticks, her blue Staffordshire souvenir plates, her turkey platter. I lifted and placed these things and thought about what her life was like, what she might have wanted to do with it and what she did. She used to tell me stories that changed as she told them, that differed from time to time. That was how it seemed to me then. Now I think it was all the same story, just seen from different perspectives.
Thanksgiving is a good time for appreciating what you have. No more zinnias or cosmos in the garden, but the nigella and goldenrod, standing tall and dry outside in the cold, make a lovely arrangement.
There’s leftover pumpkin pie for breakfast, while on the front porch the frost is definitely on the pumpkin.
Snow outlines the trees, blows off, comes back, blows off. The sky’s not the same twice in ten minutes.
On my windowsill another transition is happening: the poinsettias, so lush and green when I brought them in form the deck, are starting to turn red. The next season is coming along.
Robin Richstone 