Remember the Christmas Past Ghost, that fearsome and beautiful creature, a sweet voiced child who shows you things about yourself that you just about can’t bear to look at?
That’s kind of what opening the box of our Christmas ornaments felt like. This year was better than last year — which we called “the completion grade Christmas” — but still.
Andrew got the Christmas tree this year. I told him on Saturday morning it was his job because it’s only me and him living here now and even though he’s only 20 as the man of the house he knew that this was a sacred duty. He went out and bought a large tree, 9 ft tall and without any help he found the tree stand, set it up, and put water in the bowl. The lights we had stored from a previous year were broken. So Andrew went out and bought new lights, multicolored ones. He wound them around the tree.
And then the Decorations
Now it would be up to me to decorate. I have a lot of decorations, four boxes. They go back to my first Christmas away from home. It was 1986. The tree topper angel is yellowed and one wing is almost brown and curves at the corner. But her china face with its demure closed eyes remains flawless. Andrew is telling me that we should have had a star all along. How did we ever become an angel family?
My own family had a star when I was a child and I didn’t want to be like them. I wanted to do everything different. So in 1986 we bought an angel. I wonder if the Christmas Past Ghost was watching that decision.
Tiny Broken Things
So many things are broken as I begin to unpack, not just the glass balls which don’t have a foil cap so you can’t hang them (I guess I put them aside thinking I would find a foil cap somewhere? When I had more time than I had the Christmas before?) Mrs. Toad is an ornament from the Metropolitan Museum of art in New York City. Interpreted from drawings in Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, she wears a Victorian gown and her foot is broken off. But it’s not very noticeable. She is hung across the tree from Mr Toad who wears breeches and a tailcoat and bows deeply. They have been there since 1990-something…. I don’t know when she broke.
Was it before or after I broke myself? I don’t know. I broke several times, it seems to me now, over the years, but somehow put myself back together.
And here are the Santa ornaments that are made of plastic canvas cross stitched in white and red yarn. My grandmother gave them to me. When you pinch their cheeks Santa’s mouth and jaws open and inside you are supposed to put a Hershey’s kiss so that children can find them. Once the child finds the secret stash, you wait until the child is gone and then put another one in. It seems like Christmas magic to them. I don’t remember when I stopped keeping the bag of Hershey’s kisses in a drawer. When Andrew was three? Four?
How To Get A Year of Good Luck
The Christmas pickle is in there too. Also it’s special jar is in the box, though someone lost the lid a decade or more ago. If you find the Christmas pickle it’s supposed to mean a year of good luck. The adults are supposed to hide the Christmas pickle somewhere on the tree so a kid can find it and have good luck for a year, supposedly, but this time I just put it in the middle of the tree. There’s only me and Andrew anyway. So I guess he’s going to get the good luck this year. But wait, Scarlett will be here on Christmas Eve so she will have a chance. Though we had a lot of fun with the Christmas pickle I don’t know if it ever worked for actual good luck. You know how that is.
I put up Andrews glass ball ornaments, the blue ones he bought at a garage sale back when we lived in Sugar Land Texas. It was February and Tiara and I were looking for furniture in one of those rich subdivisions by the lake. Andrew, who was ten, found for $10 a box of 50 blue glass Christmas ornaments, shaped in spires and stars and bells, brand new like they just came out of Costco. He said “I want this” and we’re like yeah yeah sure. I used them for my Blue Christmas tree right after the divorce.
So Many Angels
There are an awful lot of angels on the tree. There are tin ones, and cloth ones, ones with linen skirts, starched into dramatic folds, and China angels, and Lucite angels, and one made of wire which I put down low, because the kids can’t break it, and one of glass, which I put up high, because they can, and I look at them all and wonder what they mean? Are they watching over us? Are they just symbols of real angels who are actually here? Any one of them could have stood in for the Christmas Past Ghost, I suppose.
Mary the mother of God is all over too. She’s there in a painted disk copied from Beajureau, she’s our Lady of Grace standing on a platform, she’s our Lady of Fatima in plastic plaster, we have Mary sitting by the manger, and Mary crowned by stars. Mary shows us again and again the young mother. Christmas is about the birth of Jesus, of course, but you can’t do birth without a mother. Mary is the patron of Christmas.
I was a young mother once too and believe me Christmas is pretty splendid when you’ve got small children in the house. Although they break the ornaments.
What Will the Neighbors Say?
Andrew is watching me decorate. He tells me that I must put some ornaments on the back by the glass window, which looks out on the side yard. There’s the Mulroney’s window on the other side of the fence, and there’s their Christmas tree with their ornaments on the back side so we can see them.
I say why should we bother it’s just the Mulroney’s. But Andrew is a purest. He says we must have ornaments all over the tree. He bought a 9-ft bushy Noble fur and he wants it covered with ornaments.
I dig deeper in the last of the ornament boxes. The tree is getting covered with decorations, but many of the ornaments are broken. Why did I save these? What was I thinking? These cloth ornaments with rips in them, the snowman with the eyes poked out. A couple of plastic figurines that dogs have chewed up, and then there’s the music box egg which used to play Silent Night but now it’s just a heavy broken piece of ceramic. Why didn’t I throw it away before? Did I really believe it would somehow come back to life?
Looking for Signs of Human Love
It’s broken like our family. First you throw away the broken ornaments, next, you realize your life back then … is irretrievable.
When I started thinking that way, I realized I probably shouldn’t have skipped yoga on Sunday. My mood has sunk. Surely there must be some redeeming signs of love and the durability of the human spirit in here?
Well, here’s an indestructible square of fabric given to me by a woman I worked with in an office in 2001. It was scented with peppermint back then but now it just smells like sawdust. I put it up as a memory of her, even though I didn’t know her particularly well and she wasn’t a particularly attractive person. Yet her generous act of giving me a Christmas ornament really did touch me as did her effort to sew it himself. The simple ornament, two squares of Christmas fabric with the string for hanging it up, about 3 in square…. I remember when I received it and I looked at it and said “oh how lovely” and I thought to myself in my heart “she doesn’t actually know how to sew but the thought counts for a lot.”
Not too far from that ornament is a needlepoint pillow ornament that I made of a court jester, with corded velvet edges and back.
This Might Be An Example of Love Conquering Limits
I remember I really wanted to make that ornament so beautiful. I designed it myself and I executed it and I kept it away from the dogs because they chewed up my needlepoint pillows (I don’t have any more of those. Dogs are no respecter of art.) And is my ornament really better than the one sewed by my colleague? Mine is the symbol of my constant striving for superiority, hers is a simple act of human connection and, now, unexpected remembering.
No wonder I wanted to keep her ornament.
In the bottom of the box is a Texas Lucite boot. I make a hook of ribbon and hang it up. We must remember Texas, even though Andrew always tells me that I hate Texas. He’s not far wrong yet we lived there for 15 years. It’s impossible not to honor the years we lived there and the things we learned. And the ornaments we bought at the time.
After I put all the ornaments on the tree that are still serviceable I pack up all the broken ones. How long have they been sitting in the bottom of these boxes. What did I think, that they were going to heal themselves? It’s like in Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, where she didn’t throw her husband’s shoes away after he died, because he might come back and want them.
So long did I put off tossing the ornaments.
I chide myself for being unable to throw things away things that were once beautiful. You have to hold on to them right? No, you should throw them out so new things can come.
Every Who Down in Whoville
I remember the Christmas of my childhood and I hum The Who Christmas song from the Grinch Who Stole Christmas: “Dahu Doris, Dahu Doris welcome Christmas come at last…” (song starts at .30)
Andrew hears me. “What is that you are singing” he asks?
“It’s the Who Christmas Carol from the original Grinch who stole Christmas,” I tell him, “The animated one.”
Andrew’s generation believes that the Jim Carey Grinch is the canonical version. They have only a vague notion of the animated Grinch.
Though the Dr Suess book is still selling and I just read the Grinch who stole Christmas to Ella and little Bob on Saturday night.
I think about how we romanticize our memories and how sometimes they become larger and larger as the years go by. I think of my father and how much I miss him. But sometimes people are gone long before they are gone.
This is why you must be true to your beliefs and follow your dreams to their conclusions because if not when you are dying you will be unable to say the things that should be said, and as the Bible says, to put your lands in order.
You don’t want to have any missed opportunities to remember when you’re lying on your deathbed.
A Brief Kind Word
My father’s brother, my uncle, sent me a Christmas card this week, the only one I’ve received so far.
He wrote “Trust you are well. Don’t know what happened with Leo.”
For some reason this quick scrawled note at the bottom of a simple Christmas card, accompanied by a letter which details his travels, the birds he saw, the achievements of his grandchildren, and a picture of the whole family, touches me more than a little and I return to it later in the middle of the night as I’m lying awake thinking about the Ghost of Christmas past.
Much of Christmas past is beautiful but Christmas future holds its promise too. And I believe that as long as we are here we are meant to go forward. This must be the case since as we all know we cannot go back in time the gears don’t turn that way. The Ghost of Christmas Past is a fleeting memory, but the future is huge.
It is enough to remember for a moment, to take a deep sigh over the broken Christmas ornaments, but then we must throw them out. They will not grow foil caps again. And anyway I don’t want them back. I don’t want to rehang the purple oblong glass bulbs from 2005, or the small silver ones from 1998, or the huge round one someone bought somewhere God knows where.
Christmas morning
Andrew says we must go to Tiara’s house on Christmas morning because he doesn’t want it to be just me him and Scarlett who’s driving across the country after she graduates from Marine Basic School on December 22nd.
And I decide to ask Tiara to go with me next weekend to Jax, the Colorado outdoor shop, because we need to keep adding ornaments to our collection. It’s okay to romanticize the future just like we romanticize the past.
I vow to write a Christmas letter and send it and tell them all the things that have happened and not worry too much whether they like it because after all they have their past and their future too.
The Ghost of Christmas Past comes for your welfare, your salvation, even. Let that be true then, for all of us, as we go forward to Christmas Present and Christmas Future.
