Christmas Memories
These December days, Christmas memories abound. Mornings and evenings, Kit and I sit by the cast iron gas stove that warms the center of our home and take in the wintry scene beyond the high front windows that look out on tall pines and firs flocked like Christmas trees. As temperatures rise above freezing, snow bombs come crashing down from on high. The explosion fills the air with cascading white powder that reminds me of the magic of dust turned to gold by sunlight as it streams in from high windows in Istanbul’s Hagia Sofia.
Inside, a glow from tiers of tiny white Italian lights on a 5-foot tabletop tree reflect off shiny glass ornaments and illuminate a pheasant with brilliant teal and burgundy feathers perched atop a wreath that hangs above the tree. Outside the window, two great Chinese urns filled with greens and artificial berries have been flocked by last week’s snowstorm and make a lovey backdrop to our indoor Christmas tree. On the other side of the open spaced room, a three-foot flocked tree atop a cabinet is filled with old-fashioned ornaments that celebrate the animal world that has been part of our lives for decades—cats, dogs, bears, squirrels, mice, hedgehogs, birds—and other ornaments that bring me joy.
My Christmas memories go back to when my parents moved our family from Texas to western Massachusetts. At the age of nine, I experienced my first New England winter where snow was measured in feet, and I learned to ice skate backwards and make figure 8s on a neighborhood pond. That Christmas, a 9-foot Noble fir took over our living room. Illuminated by strings of lights the bluish color of December moonlight on ice, the tree indeed took on a noble air. Mother handcrafted a collection of dazzling pastel-colored, frosted glass balls that she decorated with pearls and tiny seashells. The final touch came when my father sprayed the entire tree with white artificial snow. Mother’s bejeweled ornaments transformed the open branches of the Noble fir into something exquisite and breathtaking. I couldn’t imagine that any other child in the world had a more beautiful Christmas tree to gaze upon.
In the late 1970s, Kit and I moved into a tiny canyon cottage in west Los Angeles with his children Hayden and Heidi, and my cats Muffin and Tiggy. Small as that 1928 cottage was, we made room next to its open stone hearth for a gorgeous cut tree and filled it with white light, ornaments, and plaid ribbons tied to the ends of branches. Among our most treasured ornaments all these decades later are those made by Heidi when she was ten. As a child, Heidi went through pounds of colored Sculpey clay crafting expressive brown bears wearing plaid scarves and gray elephants on downhill skis with cats clinging to their necks. Each was complete with a wire loop baked into the top of the ornament so it could be hung from a tree branch.
After my mother passed away just shy to her 100th birthday, my sisters and I sorted through the tall cupboards in her garage where my parents had stored boxes filled with vintage ornaments from their Christmases and ours together going back to the 1940s. Among the boxes was a treasure trove of the fragile pastel ornaments she’d decorated with pearls and shells in the mid-1950s for my sisters and me when we lived in western Massachusetts. Three of them now hang on our tree.
This month as I got up in our garage attic and hauled down boxes of ornaments, assorted wreaths, sleigh bells, stuffed bears from Heidi’s childhood, and began putting up decorations one room at a time, memories from a lifetime of Christmases have come flooding back, filling me with joy tempered by the sadness of loved ones lost over time. Of family and friends who live an ocean or half a continent away, too far to gather with this holiday season. Of the passage of time rushing by that I cannot still. Of recent years when caution has kept neighbors from visiting each other’s homes.
In the woods at the end of our road here in the Sierra Foothills, there is a walking trail that leads to an opening where those who passed by during the period of Covid isolation hung ornaments on a tall fir tree at its center. It was a way of connecting with neighbors even when they could not. Last night at dusk, I walked down the driveway to our mailbox and found the small cedar next to it has been decorated with glittering strands of green ribbon and ornaments. That act of kindness and connection by one of our neighbors is a joyful reminder of the miracle that Christmas can truly be.
“The miracle of Christmas is that, like the distant and very musical voice
Of the hound, it penetrates finally and becomes heard in the heart.” - E. B. White