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Category: holidays

Appreciation

Appreciation

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Our
old house has seen better days. The siding is dented, the walkway is
cracked, the yard is muddy and tracked with Copper’s paw prints. Inside
is one of the fullest and most aromatic trees we’ve ever chopped down.
Cards line the mantel, the fridge is so full it takes ten minutes to
find the cream cheese. Which is to say we are as ready as we will ever
be. The family is gathering. I need to make one more trip to the grocery
store.

This morning I thought about a scene from one of my
favorite Christmas movies, one I hope we’ll have time to watch in the
next few days. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Jimmy Stewart has just
learned he faces bank fraud and prison, and as he comes home beside
himself with worry, he grabs the knob of the bannister in his old house — and it comes off in his hand. He is exasperated at this; it seems to represent his failures and shortcomings.

By
the end of the movie, after he’s been visited by an angel, after his
family and friends have rallied around him in an unprecedented way,
after he’s had a chance to see what the world would have been like
without him — he grabs the bannister knob again. And once again, it
comes off in his hand. But this time, he kisses it. The house is still
cold and drafty and in need of repair. But it has been sanctified by
friendship and love and solidarity.

Christmas doesn’t take away
our problems. But it counters them with joy. It reminds us to appreciate
the humble, familiar things that surround us every day, and to draw
strength from the people we love. And surely there is a bit of the
miraculous in that.

Photo: Flow TV

This is a re-post from December 24, 2011. Merry Christmas!
It’s a Wrap!

It’s a Wrap!

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Gift wrapping can be a meditative experience. Last night as I was cutting and taping and smoothing edges, I thought about my
system, that it’s a little like painting. I spend as much time prepping as I do
actually wrapping.

Prepping means finding the items, removing their price tags,
matching them with their gift receipts, swaddling them in tissue paper and arranging them in a box. Only then can the wrapping begin. Of course there are
items that need no boxes. Books are good for this. Or other things (can’t be too specific here or I would spoil some surprises) that come already boxed. God bless ’em.

And then there are gift bags. I’ve been late
to jump aboard the gift bag train. Seems like cheating to me. But when it’s 11 p.m. and the back is hurting from bending over the bed (which is how I always
wrap gifts and probably always will), the gift bags and the perky colored
tissue paper start to look pretty good.

I finished a lot of wrap-prep and even some
wrapping last night. Enough to tell me how much more buying I have to do. So now – yes, I know, I know – I will have even more
wrapping to do tonight. What can I say? ‘Tis the season.

Checking It Twice

Checking It Twice

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This year, for the first time, my Christmas list is electronic. I’m using the “notes” feature of my smart phone.

It has worked surprisingly well — with one exception. There’s no easy way to “check off” the purchased items. I’m making do by typing an asterisk beside each one.

How I wish I could draw a thick black line or make a decisive “X” through the gifts I’ve bought. I suppose I could just delete them, but that’s no fun.

Makes me realize that a list is not just about what I have to do; it’s about what I’ve already done. Checking off the finished tasks makes me feel competent and efficient — which at this time of year I most decidedly am not! All the more reason to crave the illusion.

It’s a pathetic little revelation, but a revelation just the same!

Where We Are

Where We Are

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Lights strung along rooftops, wound around tree trunks and lampposts. Nets of lights on shrubs and hedges. Spotlights on wreathed front doors.

At the far end of my neighborhood is a house with a backyard that dips down into the woods. I never know where the yard ends and the woods begin. Except this time of year.

We light our lives to taunt the darkness. But along the way we outline them too.

The lights tell us where we are.

Christmas Itself

Christmas Itself

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A week till the big day, and there is still much to do. Gifts that need buying. Cookies that need baking. Cards that need mailing. Packages that need wrapping.

It’s easy to get caught up in seasonal hysteria.

But then I look at our tree and remember how pleasant it was to trim it this year. I think of dear ones here and far away. I see the dog biscuit the UPS man has left on top of the packages by our door, a funny peace offering to the canine who drives him crazy.

I take my time on the cookies, the notes, the ribbons and bows.

These aren’t way stations on the road to Christmas. They are Christmas itself.

Light from Inside

Light from Inside

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A gray morning. I turn on the tree lights early. I sit and work beside the fir.

At first it distracts me, so many ornaments have stories. And even the shape of the tree this year — a widened base, giving it a solid, grounded feel — draws my gaze.

But I strengthen my resolve. I will myself to see it only from the corner of an eye.  To work beside it, to let its presence spur and not derail the day.

Less than a week until solstice; the light must come from inside.

Wreathed Whimsy

Wreathed Whimsy

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Some people put wreaths on their car; they deck the wheels instead of the halls. There was a time in my life — the “Carpool Years” — when that would have made sense.

For the most part, it makes sense to wreathe a stationary object — a door, a window, a lamppost.

The other day on my way to work I noticed a tall, dead tree with an equally dead branch all decked out with a, well, dead wreath.  Dead only in the sense that it was fashioned of clipped boughs. It was still fresh and green. And it made me smile at 7 a.m.

Here on our street a neighbor has wreathed her mailbox. At night it glows.

Wreathed whimsy — ’tis the season.

Reentry Walk

Reentry Walk

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Low skies and gray clouds made for a tough reentry yesterday. The pleasures of the table, of family and friends, of long sleeps and easy afternoons — all reverted to workaday tasks and tedium. Even the knowledge of more holidays in the near future, of how much there is to do between now and Christmas — even those thoughts didn’t move me.

So when I left the house at lunchtime, I made my way to the meadow. I needed the sweep of open land, of a path running through it, of birds on the wing.

And that’s what I found: quiet fields asleep for the season, a pair of robins (so soon? ), and a still pond without last week’s thin skin of ice — a still pond that is liquid once again.

Familiar sights, easy on the eye and stimulating to the brain.

Yesterday’s walk that did what the best walks do: send me cheerfully back into my day.

Getting the Tree

Getting the Tree

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We’re several weeks ahead of schedule, but the girls were here and the weather was fair, so yesterday we drove  to Snicker’s Gap to cut our Christmas tree. After Leesburg, foothills appear on the horizon and the road curves up to meet them. Soon after that, I spot the familiar hillside, parceled in fir and pine.

I breathed in the evergreen scent, took in the scene, livelier than usual this busy weekend. As with any annual tradition, I was measuring, calculating, thinking about where we are now compared with this time last year. A better place, I decide, shoulders relaxing as we trudge up the hill.

The trees are healthy and plentiful, and there is variety in each plot. Old trees and young trees, tall and short — giant blue spruce and scraggly pine seedlings — all share the same southern slope. As I watch the girls stride ahead I realize they aren’t the only ones who’ve grown up. The trees being cut today were babies when we first came here.

We have lived through an entire Christmas tree life-cycle: 10 years of rain and sun and wind and snow. Ten years of growing pains, of hour-long car trips here, some coerced, some not.

And still we return to saw the trunk and topple the tree; to drag it, lash it and bring it home. We drive west to seek the southern slope. We mark the years as best we can.

Humble Sides

Humble Sides

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Yesterday’s feast, like every other Thanksgiving meal I’ve ever cooked, was proof that though the turkey gets all the glory it’s the side dishes, the humble sides, that deserve it. They are where the real finesse comes in, the true effort; they are more difficult to prepare and, arguably, more scrumptious to consume.

Here it was fairly light as holiday cooking goes. The yams were baked, the potatoes were boiled — and I wasn’t responsible for the green bean casserole.

But the stuffing involved dicing and stirring, ditto the cranberry salad. And the pies (though a dessert and not a side dish) are always labor-intensive, though I wouldn’t have them any other way.

On the other hand, the turkey is easy to baste and roast — and it sits regally atop the table, the centerpiece, the champ.

The humble sides don’t seem to mind, though. They have long since accepted their relegated roles. In exchange, they avoid the slow, protracted, death march of the leftover — no sad progression from sandwich to salad to hash for them. The turkey, they know, gets its comeuppance in the end.

(What to eat the day after.)