Getting out the ornaments

This morning I was up early, designing an invitation for an open house we are going to hold on Christmas day. After that, I found myself laying ornaments out on the dining room table.

Some time ago, I got rid of the usual round balls you hang on the tree - we don't do a tree anymore, since when? I wonder. Maybe since we moved here. In the old house I used to enjoy dragging the tree out behind the garage. You could see it from the kitchen table, how the birds used it as a nice snug habitat. But after we got Sherlock, the Bad Cat, having a tree became ever more precarious with Sherlock. He would eat tinsel and ribbon, so you had to be very careful about that. He didn't lie in the branches, though, like my sister's cat used to.

In this house, we put up a three-foot fiber-optic tree that twinkles and change colors. This cost $29 only once, so after the first year, it's gravy, and putting it up is just a matter of plugging it in. It sits at the living room window, where maybe it can be seen from across the ravine. On the kitchen table we put up the lit ceramic tree Tom had made for me one year. I get an unreasonable amount of pleasure from these things.

But I set out to write about getting into the small box that holds ornaments precious to me. Some of them are actually precious, I suppose, sterling ornaments from specific years when my mother worked in a jewelry store. Several crosses, and a sterling silver bell. Then there is a golden winged horse she gave me at a time when I liked unicorns; not a unicorn, but good enough - maybe better.

I took out two felt doilies, I guess you'd call them, that I'd embroidered on my sewing machine. It was an entirely manual machine back then in the sixties, and I'm impressed that I did the scrolls freehand, how pretty these red and green things are.

Felt ornaments patterned on Czechoslovakian style. Two that I made, one that Aunt Eileen made and gave me, a cluster of felt scraps that Cassie made, all this when Cassie was just three. The instructions for these ornaments had shown up in a women's magazine, so I formed this party of the my mother, Eileen, Cassie and me. It's been many, many years since Eileen fell down the basement steps and suffered such severe brain injury that she no longer knew any of us. I look back on that ornament party now and know some things I didn't know then. For instance, that none of us had a creative outlet in her life. That my life was sadly empty of friends, so that they were actually my best friends - and that our three-generation friendship was a good thing for all of us.

I came to the cluster of half-inch square packages wrapped in foil and gold string, and smiled. You could not have them out anywhere Sherlock could reach, or they would be batted all over the house, to end up eventually way back under the couch. Worse, he might eat them. Holding those packages in my hand, I missed him in a physical way. I remembered him with love, thirteen years of a bad cat who just got worse. And we thought everything he did was remarkable.

The ornaments come out year after year, and each year has brought fresh loss. Tonight, in fact, we are going to visiting hours for our old friend, Mary Smith. Like Eileen and my mother, Mary had a aging process, leading her further into dementia and a life empty of friends and pleasures. I happen to know quite a few people who have had bad deaths. They don't have to be slow. My father's was sudden, a cerebral hemorrhage when he was alone down in the cabin.

Who has a good death? There are stories told about Zen masters, who seem to see it coming and write a death poem, or maybe produce a poem they have ready and waiting. A good death is one in which you accept the inevitability of this process, a change of state, when all the parts that make up you fall apart and go on to make up something else. When someone is willing to give up this body, this self, I imagine they can be peaceful at death, and grateful for their life. So many people I know have gone unwillingly, sometimes angry that this should happen to them no matter how hard they tried to keep living.

But I honestly do find that in the face of death, it is consoling to affirm the good moments in the life. So we stand in a funeral home and talk about how valiant Mary was, raising her children alone, how creative she was, her little sewing room stuffed with hundreds of scraps, how happy she was to buy her own house late in life. So, in the words of J. Donald Johnson, "In the presence of death, we say yes to life."

A handmade Christmas

The alert reader might notice that I changed the subtitle of this blog today, back to what it used to be. "The 10,000 Things" is one way Buddhists refer to this reality of forms. "The myriad things" is another phrase. Today, putting out our Christmas decorations, I find myself responding to, loving, things.

First was the little fiber-optic Christmas tree that changes colors in a wonderful way. We bought that after we bought this house, but before we were in it, when fiber-optics were pretty new. I remember so clearly that little store in a mall, the $29 impulse purchase - too much, but we were so happy to have found our dream house.

But the real memory trip came when I finally opened the small box inside the big Christmas storage box.

Over the years I have weeded out the things we no longer used, now that we don't put up a live tree anymore. So almost everything in the big box is something we like. On top, not packed very carefully, but unscratched, were three beautiful chrome candleholders in the shape of different snowflakes, another impulse purchase I don't regret. Like other lucky Americans our age, we have any number of things we like that are always out on shelves and tables, but you grow used to them. These, though, I had forgotten about, and finding them was a thrill.

But the little box was another story. Every ornament in it is handmade, except the sterling silver collectible ornaments my mother gave each kid every Christmas when she worked in the jewelry store. Here was a hanging door decoration that says Noel, green and gold. My mother's best friend, Eileen, whom I thought of as an aunt, gave it to me one year. This would have been in the early sixties, when I was a young mother.

Eileen's life was hard even then, long before two of the kids killed themselves, before she suffered a catastrophic brain injury in a fall: five kids, not enough money, a husband who traveled extensively, an alcoholic family. It occurs to me that I don't know whether she'd ever had any aspirations beyond being a wife and mother. She was a petite and cheerful woman who cherished her Irish ancestry, and did fulfill a dream of taking her father back to Ireland. There she bought a charming traditional costume, which she wore to the Sons of Ireland every St. Patrick's Day. She could do a little easy soft shoe while the band sang "Harrigan" and we all sang along, full of the enthusiasm of green beer.

Eileen found joy in her life where she could. I think now about her sitting those lonely evenings after getting the kids in bed and crocheting afghans, and making this pretty door hanger. Joy and sorrow intertwined.

There are other felt ornaments in that box. One of the happiest years, Eileen, my mother, and I gathered at my apartment to make those. Cassie was three. Her contribution was a mass of felt scraps glued together and placed in a copper scrubber: nestlings, baby birds in a nest.

So many women came to me out of that box. Here are starched cotton snowflakes crocheted by Helga, whom I knew in a cancer support group. Here is a beautifully tatted ornament given to me by a woman in the next office one drab year when I didn't have much Christmas. Here, thirty years later, is a construction-paper Christmas tree with a puffball star on top, signed Otto on the back.

There was something about this, and getting out the bayberry candles and the four different Christmas coffee mugs picked up at various garage sales back when I could still run around on nice summer days searching for wonderful finds. That was a lot of fun, and I'm glad I was foolish when I could be. . . . I started to say, pulling out this box and its decades of memories was somehow stabilizing and grounding. It has been hard to find some shelter from the general anxiety these days. But the box reminded me of all these connecting threads, how we pause for Christmas every year, and how people I loved return through their gifts, friendly ghosts to sit with me for a while by the fire.