Traditions—gotta love ’em

Some shots of the new studio room: (and the lovely musical son):

More Christmas

While in our house the Great Thanksgiving Feast is about food, ritual, family and tradition (is that the same as ritual?), the Great Christmas Feast has more to do with eyes, ears, smells, family, ritual and tradition. The season begins for us the moment the last turkey sandwich is constructed on the day of Pilgrims—switches are thrown, the darkness of winter and life driven back by the dancing of thousands of tiny lights draped outside our tree room window. Carols are sung during the clean up of the epic dinner. The tree goes up that weekend—and the garlands, stretched across the beams of the house—and a bit more happens every day, boxes schlepped downstairs, lifted down or dug out of their long sleep, treasures spilled onto couch and ottoman, and all the nooks and corners are rigged up to throw light back and forth and so welcome hope, invite surprise and delight, and tinge the gray of uncertainty with colors that speak of possibility.

I speak of ritual: there are certain chairs that must be stood upon to raise this side of the garland, certain otherwise constant features of the house carried upstairs to be stowed in Murphy’s room while stables and sheep and camels (these all carried home in long ago years by my parents from Egypt and Israel), families with babies and shepherds take their places.

There are also certain bad words expected when the gloriously chaotic, decorative picks we load onto the tree room garland are constantly slipping out to scatter across the floor.

And then, there is the tree.

Our tree tradition goes way back—and since I am the tree maven, starts with my side of the family. My parents chose, living in mid-LA as we did when I was very young, to have a fake tree. It was really a pretty awful affair, hard green plastic. The trunk was formed from green cones that stacked, each one with rows of two inch long, green plastic protuberances. These were the receivers for the hard plastic branches, which bristled in their turn with hard plastic spines. Upon those spines were affixed the pine needle units. It was a very plain, open architecture, good for hanging lots of things.

I remember going in and out of the garage/storage-room all through the rest of the year, looking up at the very orderly, sturdy shelves my dad had built and seeing the box for that tree, way up toward the ceiling. Seeing it and getting a secret Christmas thrill right in the middle of the summer. I still have that box. My parents, who have never tended to the sentimental – especially mom, who’d just as soon throw something out now than next month – somehow ended up giving it to me, maybe shipping something to me in it, I don’t remember. Anyway, for a good decade or more, that poor box, nearly as old as I am, now sits up in the corner of Char’s closet, full of tissue paper for present wrapping.

Here is where our carrying on of tradition begins: the tree lights. Mom and Dad used to use the big C-9s on that old tree. Those lights used to come with a bead through which the two wires that came out of the base of each light passed, a bead you could slide up and down the wires—the point being that you could slip the two wires around the branch/twig upon which you wanted to mount your light, then seat the light by sliding the big bead up till it snugged the branch. I don’t know how many strings my folks used, but I’m betting no more than two. On the day when the lights came out of their boxes, we children were banished from the living room. Banished from the house. Because Dad put those lights on the tree every year, and every year, he used a vocabulary saved only for this time, and for when he cut his fingers off in the shop (which he never really did).

Then came the careful placing of the ornaments—I had my own little places for certain ornaments, things now long lost to me. And then the absolutely delicate placing of the tinsel—never to be never thrown on, and certainly not clumped—which would, at the end of the season be lovingly collected back into its cardboard packaging.

The tree room, without a tungsten filter or flash. You can see how the outside lights reflect in all of the windows.

I don’t do tinsel anymore. In fact, we had a live tree every year for a long, long time when Guy and I first married. But tradition will out, and I am the person now with the vocabulary. Live trees do not last long when they are smothered in lights. As I am partial to my house, I was finally forced to face the probabilities, so when Gin moved out in college and Cammon left on his mission and so weren’t there to help anymore, I finally bought a fake tree.

Six hours worth of lighting each year became six hours done only once and capitalized every year after. This cut down on my Christmas swearing by a considerable percentage. But I am still holding faith with my father; someone has to explain to me how a string of lights that has worked beautifully for a month, been stored away for eleven, and then brought out again, plugged in and brightly lit for two days the next year can suddenly and simply just go dark. Right in the middle of the tree. The decorated tree.

This is where years of vocabulary building comes in handy. And when you spend two hours undressing the tree, unwinding the lights, lying on your back underneath the thing like you’re changing the oil, it is inevitable that halfway through the process the (colorful explicative) string will suddenly light right up again: Hello! Merry Christmas!! Here I am working!! Why are you under the tree????

Our tree is jammed with ornaments. Some of them I made when I was maybe ten, twelve years old. I think I started the making ornaments thing. Or my Aunt Polly did, one year when we visited her, by opening up the world of glue and glitter to me. After that, I went to felt. Then to satin and beads. Then, decades later, to every conceivable medium – clay, glass, wire, beads, wood, felt, fabric, fleece. We have ornaments my father made in 1967, and that my mom and dad sent me – one each every year for a very long time – beaded bells, lace angels, wooden barns, clever little sculptures of old fashioned phones and lighthouses and all kinds of things. And there are the things Guy has made, and the many, many things the children have made.

Not a lot of detail in these – maybe you can see something. I don’t know how to do the click and it’s gigantic thing.

And then, there is the party. I have written about it before. It started with my parents, when my father was Bishop, an ornament exchange with a few friends they worked with at church. My favorite of the ones my parents won is a popsicle stick snowflake, three of them glued together, painted red on one side. On the other side there is written in the same red paint and with a non-too-dainty brush: “Wrong Side. Turn This Side Toward Tree.”

So the year after we moved into this house – the house Guy and I had built together – we started our own party with a few close friends. It was Hoffmans, Loukes, Tricia, Smiths and a few others—and for twenty eight years the party has gone on, more good friends added very slowly over time—but the same basic list of people, moaning over the obligations of creativity. People who had not known each other have become old friends over our cut-throat game. It’s been an amazing thing.

The game is nothing new—you bring a wrapped home-made ornament, choose numbers, open a wrapped one in your turn, or steal one somebody else has opened. Third winner keeps. Takes hours. Engenders creative cheating, public begging, energetic accolades, tears—and brings out the wit in even me. So I am including pictures of us and this year’s crop of ornaments. Of Dick’s, I have actually done a photo essay—he never plays the game right, but whatever he does, it’s ALWAYS worthy of an essay.

Some year, Cam wants us all to play the game, but then donate our ornaments, putting them up on Ebay for auction, money to be given to charity. And some year, when we have all grown up enough to overcome our greed (some of these ornaments take months to make), we just might do that.

I’m going to cap this off with a serious observation: our lives have been so enriched by this kind of thing—long-time friends, strong traditions that connect our years and give direction and shape (not to mention pleasure and fun and roaring good times) to our lives. I taught my children a long time ago: if you want a really great birthday party, just figure you’re going to plan it yourself. Because that’s what life is—you get it as a gift, then you have to pick it up in your own two hands and shape it yourself. Shape it into something you can treasure, something that will dance like light against the darkness that inevitably comes to us.

The end of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” is just too sweet and schmaltzy for some people, but I’m telling you, much of the precious truth is just that, and I would give much—and have given much—to know the feeling in George Bailey’s heart as he stands under that tree with his kids and family around him, knowing that he has done some good for people, and that there are people in the world who would go a ways to do some good for him. Love isn’t something you fall into, or win in a sweepstakes, or get dropped on your head by an arbitrary God—or even that you win by good deeds. It’s something you build. Something you plant and nurture, something that you can always give, even if you are never given any yourself.

And it’s worth it. It’s so worth it. To give up being right all the time, or being in control, or getting the last cookie, or being rich—to give up all that stuff that creates divisiveness and to replace it with service, with civility, with kindness, with self-less love and giving.

I do not want to bring up the slow death of Christmas as a festival of rejoicing, gratitude and religious wonder—but it is so symptomatic of our times. The very things that Christ taught, that he demonstrated with his life, are the things in which we find lasting and solid joy and underlying, unquenchable peace and happiness. Not jumping on the beds happiness, just sitting quietly and glowing happiness, or even just floating on the top and not drowning happiness. People may believe what they will, but on this earth, what goes up must come down, and all the philosophy and glib argument and emotional manipulation in the world will not change that.

So, again – Merry Christmas. I leave you with what I believe myself, with what I have seen to be dear and valuable and true in this world, and again, with my best wishes for your joy, your full heart, your wonderful life.

Some of the ornaments: (many snuck out without being recorded):