And know me better, man—

The header above is honest to gosh real holly from a real holly tree, compliments of Gin and Rhode Island.

Today’s morning surprise.  More snow.  And this isn’t the end, they say – 

Yikes.  The air is full of stuff.  And no two stuffs are ever exactly alike.

Dogs in attendance.

Dogs wait while man shovels.

Like: Gonzo fiddles while George Burns (double allusion. Well – one real allusion built on a slant allusion – any guesses as to the source(s)?)

The Post:

The nephew: ”I am sure I have always thought of Christmastime, when it has come around—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of the people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

I don’t know when it was that my father first started reading this story to us aloud at Christmas time.  But I remember the book very clearly, a big white volume with a smiling Scrooge on the cover.  And the feeling—my father, always a brilliant reader, sitting in a chair beside the Christmas tree, stopping every so often to glower at us over the top of the page, because we never could hold still.  He thought we weren’t listening.  But really, we were dancing.  Dancing to that lilting tone he used, to the glorious, opulent richness of the language heaped into that gift of a story, to the incipience of Christmas day itself—even to the mystery of that peculiar and wonderful birth, whenever date it may actually have occurred upon, two thousand years ago.

My family was not a very formal one.  But we had our traditions.  Maybe they were just things that happened because my mother liked things to be orderly, to make sense, and so—once she’d set herself up with the tools and the process—she repeated them each year.  But to me, the child whose mind was built for tradition and wonder, these things became the breath of home, the fire in the grate of what would be, has been, my whole life.

I always used to put one tiny ornament in the exact same spot, deep inside our awful plastic tree—a tiny crèche that sheltered a miniscule and almost Rembrandt colored picture of the holy family below a roof encrusted with glitter.  Fake tree—not glamorous or romantic, but dependable.  No matter where we lived, the box went with us.  And so did the tiny crèche.

My mother made cookies, and while I may have written about this before, I will still again because it was so much the light of the time for us: thin, crispy sugar cookies from a recipe handed down from Mother Tyner, my great grandmother on my father’s side.  These were business-like cookies, no frosting, only sugar sprinkles and sometimes tiny, colored sugar beads, or those b-b sized silver things you weren’t supposed to eat.

And candy cane cookies, literally twisted out of ropes of white and red dough, flavored with almond and sprinkled with pummeled peppermints.  The best part was in the crook of the cane, where the peppermint pooled as it cooked and settled into a bright mint crust.

And stained glass windows made from a million scissor cut gumdrops of all colors (except black), suspended in a rich dough of oatmeal and brown sugar and pecans.

And what I now know as Russian tea cakes, but my father always used to call Reindeer droppings.

We’d make these things (she’d make them and we’d pretend to help—never say yes if somebody wants you to cut gumdrops with scissors) then pile them on plates and drive them around to friends’ houses.  It was only in much later years, I think, that we began to sing at the door as we waited for it to open.

My father always had a project—some small wood thing that he made dozens of as gifts.  The one I remember most, and that hangs on my own wall, was an elegant wooden cut-out of an old fashioned key.  He’d cut these on the jig saw, then carefully sand them down and paint the things black.  And then—and now, knowing him, I’m just awe-struck at the patience he used to have—he’d paint, very meticulously, tiny vines and flowers and details all over them.  Then attach a line of little hooks to the front, and give them to people to use as wall mounted key keepers.

So I come from a long line of love-token givers, bless my own fated heart.

Our house was never grandly decorated.  We had the tree (and they used big C-9 lights on it) and my parents hung fanciful ornaments and Christmas cards from line they’d strung up across the living room ceiling.  No lights outside the house.  No garlands.  Every year a Delarobia wreath they bought from Boys’ Town.  We’d take walks through our LA neighborhood looking at other people’s lights.  I never liked the silver fake trees – I could see them in the front windows, each one hung with satin balls in just one designer color, each one lit by a rotating color wheel light.  I wanted green trees, real or not, hung with silver tinsel and covered with real ornaments—blown glass shapes, home made sheep, all familiar as family.

This wasn’t what I meant to write about.  But now I’m remembering and I can’t stop.  When we moved inland, we added fires in the fireplace.  And always, the Tab Choir’s Holly and the Ivy.  One night, when everybody else was gone and I was alone in my young teen fit of cherished angst, I turned off all the lights in the house, put on the record, and lay on the floor to read “The Little Matchgirl” as published that year in the Era.  I can’t explain what happened to me, but it was as if my soul began to swell with Christmas so that I could hardly contain it.  I was suddenly connected with life and magic and mystery and mercy.  I wasn’t really thinking about the birth of Christ, but more with the subsequent charity that links us all.  It was amazing.  I can remember the taste of it in myself.  I wish it would happen again—and really, it has – once in a while and at odd times.

Again, this wasn’t what I’d planned to write.  I meant to admit that I love Christmas picks.  Dumb, huh?  And half of you don’t even know what I’m talking about – those little wired together nosegays they sell at craft places, a pastiche of winter details: pine cones, tiny presents wrapped in shiny paper, bright red or purple or blue berries, glittering wires twisted into spirals, sometimes tiny fruit shapes. 

Real greens with pick and glass ball.  And wall of house and funky metal thing.

I love ‘em.  I don’t know why.  I’m pretty sure it came on me when I was pretty little, probably because of the miniature presents part.  You attach them to gifts as part of the bow assembly, or put them—you know, wherever you like a little Christmas sparkle.  I, myself, stick them them into this one garland, the one draped across the door into the tree room.   I load them onto it because they look so opulent, darn it.  They sparkle and wink and fatten the thing up.  That’s the Christmas face I love, the one that belongs to the spirit of Christmas Present—he with his hams and mounds of fruit and puddings, and his great fur collared velvety robe.  I love the feeling of plenty—of giving mounds of things and wrapping them so that they throw their borrowed light all across the room.  Shine, shimmer, mystery, love, gratitude, generosity, chocolate, sprinkles, carols, harpsichords, brass sections, embraces, laughter, sparkle in the eyes, in the heart, in the life.  Reverence and joy.  And if I cannot come by these things naturally, I will bring it all to pass by craft, by dang.

Beleaguered garland, smiling.

 That’s how that garland feels to me.  I even hang mistletoe on it, a sad, many years dried plant that still has the power of the original.  My garland is great stuff.  You can’t walk through the doorway without brushing it, and then you get this rain of fake pears and berries and presents bashing you in the head and skittering across the floor.  It aggravates everybody but me.  (She grins and chuckles.)

Birds and snowflakes tossed with pine cones and pics and other odds and ends. Did I also mention that I love baskets full of shimmery nonsense?

I don’t know.  That’s all for now. But  I’m not finished slapping words on the season.  At the rate I’m going, that may be all the decorating I ever get to this week.  But just now, I’ve done a little number on my own heart, and I feel much chipperer.  So it’s off to slog through the snow and feed my very grateful (though you wouldn’t know it, the way they snatch) horses.