Bringing Christmas into the House

            This year's Christmas season opened, for me, with the Winter Arts Festival at Pacifica Garden, where I looked for gifts among the pottery, earrings, and fabric arts. The next day I went down to the Applegate for a Christmas concert by Voices of the Applegate, who sang uplifting holiday songs, about bells and sugar-plum fairies, including "Silent Night" (in German and in English) and "Let It Snow, Let it Snow, Let It Snow." 

              Yeah! Let it snow!

            I came home from the concert just before dark, and then, without even changing clothes, I grabbed my bow saw and walked into the woods to saw down and haul to the house the little fir tree I had selected for my Christmas tree. It sat on the porch overnight, drying out.

            Enticed by eggnog and brandy, Mike came over to help trim the tree. We stood it in its stand and wound the lights around it. Then I took the box of Christmas ornaments from the closet and began pulling memories from it to hang on the tree.

            The first thing to go on was the paper chain my son and I made when he was little. Because we lived in such a tiny house (10 x 12 feet), we didn't have a Christmas tree for the first few years, but when Ela was old enough to be aware of such customs, he asked for one. Imagining a small tree on the edge of a table, I said, "Okay." Before I knew it, Ela was bringing a full-size tree into the house. I took a deep breath and said, "How beautiful! Now let's make some ornaments to put on it."

            So we made the paper chain that still goes on the tree every year and a host of origami ornaments, delicate paper animals and objects that have lasted almost half a century. 

Later, when Ela was in sxith grade, we made three-dimensional paper stars, stiffened with wax, that he learned to make in class. Hanging these old ornaments on the tree reminded me of trimming the tree when I was a child, handling carefully the long, spiraled strips of tin and other ornaments my parents made from tin cans during World War II.

            On my Christmas tree hang the wooden sleds my mother painted and inscribed with Ela's and my names, and the okra pod she painted as a Santa Claus face with a long red Santa Claus hat on the pointed end. Here hang gifts nieces and nephews made when they were children: the paintbrush turned into a Santa Claus face, the golf ball turned into a reindeer head. There is a cloth chicken my sister sewed; the tiny wrench my niece retrieved from my father's shop after he died, now decorated with ribbons to become a Christmas tree ornament; the Sculpey Clay snowman, moon, and heart from my granddaughter. There are glass balls my neighbor painted with intricate Christmas designs, a tiny school desk ornament a child gave me when I was her teacher, and tiny sledders from a good friend – Jennifer, I think her name was – who slipped into and then out of my life many years ago. Again I hung on the tree the old-fashioned tiny figures – toy soldier, goose, rocking horse – from my daughter-in-law; the historic-design, brass ornament from the Metropolitan Museum of Art another friend gave me; the two beautifully kimonoed, Japanese-woman ornaments my sister gave me the first year Ela and I had a Christmas tree.

            I climbed the stairs to decorate the top branches, fastening, on the very top, the gold-foil star Ela made for our first Christmas tree, now a little crumpled but still taking the place of honor. Finally all that was left to do was hang the tinsel. Slowly, one by one, I hung each strand of tinsel from the tip of a branch, pulling its ends even. I bristled at Mike's suggestions that I just toss the tinsel onto the branches. Tinsel represents icicles, I explained patiently, hanging another strip on the tip of another branch. Icicles drip in long vertical shapes. They glitter in the sun. The tree is supposed to look like it's covered with icicles.

            When each tip of each branch had an icicle hanging from it, I stepped back to look at this year's Christmas tree.

             It is tall and columnar, so it doesn't take up too much room in this small house. Because it had been growing in a tight clump of firs, it was missing limbs on one side, so we could snug it up against the wall in front of the stairs. Its icicles sparkle in the noon-day sun or glitter from reflections of its own lights. It brings the season of Christmas into the house and, along with that, all the love of friends and family that dangles from its branches. 

             When I looked at the tree, my mother's words, repeated year after year when I was a child, rose to my lips: "It's the prettiest tree we've ever had."