Christmas Memories

Today I have a post, Christmas is Hope, over at bestselling author Liz Flaherty’s Window Over the Sink blog. I write about the hopeful women heroines of my three Christmas stories, and how my mother inspired the creation of those characters. You can read the post here.

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Maybe some of you read the post I wrote last year for Liz’s Window Over the Sink. I, of course, had completely forgotten what all I’d written. And I wrote this year’s essay for Window before I read last year’s. When I did read the essay from last year, I was struck to see up close and personal, as the saying goes, my mother’s influence in my delight, faith, and hope in Christmas. It is true, writing shows me myself. I repost the essay below, with some editing.

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Christmas Tree Memories

I grew up with live Christmas trees. Yes, I’m old enough to remember a time before artificial trees. And the trees when I was a child were naturally scrawny things, which Mama proceeded to over-load with decorations. There was a prescribed sequence to decorating: lights first, then the glass ball dating from my mother’s teen years (WWII), and then this little china Cupie-doll with no legs that Mama would tie all the way on the trunk of the tree. Then all manner of glass balls, and lastly, tinsel.

My mother had grown up in the thirties, and Christmas tree tinsel was in vogue. Mama loved her tinsel.

My brother and I, and there is Mama’s tree glimmering with tinsel.

Tinsel back then was shredded aluminum foil. It didn’t go sliding off the tree like the plastic stuff does today. Being a child of the depression, my mother was thrifty. She did not throw out tinsel, but saved as much as possible from year to year in a large battered box, which made it all the way to the late 1960s. You should have seen my future husband’s face when he saw that box of mashed up tinsel that would be reused on the tree.

In the seventies, my mother moved up to modern times and had what was all the rage—an artificial aluminum tree. Yes, you guessed it—she put tinsel on an aluminum tree.

The first year my husband and I celebrated Christmas in our own little apartment, I determined that I was not going to have a cheap, scrawny tree. By then Scotch Pine was in vogue, and by golly, I was having one. My dear husband left the choosing up to me, and we came home with a tree so full of branches that ornaments did not hang but stuck out in the air. My husband did draw the line with tinsel, though. He made me hang each strand of tinsel separately, and not too much. Over the next days, whenever he went to work, I added a bit of it here and there.

I would buy tinsel each season to have for the next year, but then came the year I had run out. I could not find tinsel anywhere; it had become obsolete. I was sorely disappointed. The following year, readers alerted me that a drugstore was selling tinsel. I was excited, however, much less so when I found it was plastic. The old aluminum tinsel had become a thing of the past.

Time marches on and life changes. I did not have a tree at all last year. The other day I discovered that you can order live trees delivered to your home. Maybe that’s a full-circle thing, because I imagine in Mama’s childhood one could have a tree delivered to the house.

The one thing that has not and never will change is the spirit behind it all, which is love. It is love that gave us Christmas. It is love that has for centuries now propelled us into this yearly craziness of putting a tree in the middle of the house (sometimes tied to the wall to keep the cat from knocking it over.) and indulging in a fine example of self-forgetfulness with gift buying and giving, cooking and gathering. It is all for love. May you enjoy it to the full, and carry it with you into the coming year.

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The season is on, dear friends. As Marilee, my heroine in Christmas in Valentine, writes: “Ready, ladies? Get set. Go!” Enjoy it all, don’t miss any of it.

Grace and Peace,