Christmas Ornaments I Have Loved and Lost

It is time again to take the boxes of winter holiday/Christmas acoutrements out. We gathered a fine noble fir from one of my yoga student's farms, and it sits waiting for decorations. A year has passed and my ornaments have diminished each year. I haven't purchased any lately, with the kids all grown, and barely able to arrange a time to come and see a tree. It has become an exercise in remembrance now, each ornament, where it came from, why I bought it, who made it, what year it represents and how much it appeals aestheticallly to someone looking at my tree with no knowledge of the history.
Silly, this stuff of mothers, but there it is.

Here is the history of ornaments passed, as well as I can remember them:  (If I forget one of you, please forgive me, I have had too much on my mind as of late and doubtless when I am much, much older, the memory of you will return).

The first lost ornament would have been about 50 years ago, in Salem, OR. My Dad's folks came to Christmas day, and I was 6, so excited for our holiday and gifts, special foods. Ah, the child's view of Christmas. When Grandad came in the door, I pulled him over to our tree to show him my favorite ornament. It was one of those glass balls, painted in vivid colors, with *glitter* liberally covering the orb of it's surface. I held the bauble - we called them baubles- in my hand and said, "Look Grandad!"

Quiet Grandad, (Louis) humored me and smiled at my enthusiam. He was such a good, kind man. My ardor for the bauble reached a peak, and my hands squeezed it tightly enough that I crushed it. Yea, my little child hands made the glass ball break with the sound of a 'pop', and it fell to the floor in sad shards. I was mortified. Grandad did not know what to say. Luckily everyone knew it was an accident, and my parents did not make me feel bad. But oh, I missed that ornament, I missed it every year. It had a twin, but the twin was the lesser pretty of the 2, so every year I would either avoid that twin when we decorated the tree, or I would gingerly hang it, with a sad little heart.

The second lost ornaments happened many years later, when I was a mother. When my boys were little I made salt dough before Christmas, and we would sit around the kitchen table fashioning our Christmas ornaments. My kids are very creative, and I knew that years later I would cherish their creations, just as I cherished their child selves, fun loving and free.

We made ornaments every year for 5 or 6 years, marking the year on the back. In time, we moved to a house near the ocean, where lots of racoons lived. Can you see where this is going? Well, I could not, because I stored my Christmas boxes in the basement, where I had left a window open to vent the clothes dryer. (The previous owners had never seen fit to install a dryer vent, just one of those little things one misses when looking at a prospective house). So one day I went downstairs and found my boxes ravaged and a feast of salt dough had ocurred right there in my basement, the lovely carefully decorated creations of my children from so many years were now in shreds, or completely gone. First I was aghast, then I was very angry, and lastly I could not help wondering how acrylic paint and fixitive tasted to these hoodlums of the woods. They were huge racoons, by the way, they came up to the windows and looked in with absolutely no fear.  They were as big as a large dog, but with human like hands. I had to not think of that too much. I made new dough and coaxed an ornament or 2 from the boys, but then they got too old for that sort of thing, and salt dough became a thing of the past.

The most recent ornaments lost were those I purchased while living at the coast, in one of those upscale Christmas shops. Glass, again seemed right, it cannot mold, be eaten, or dissipate into a mush over time. The peach ornament I bought the year my youngest son was liking peaches.. I wrote on it in indelible pen "Amery 1994, A peach of a guy" which. of course, he was. Every year that cute little peach came out, to remind him and me, of our mutual affection, and of the year, receding further and further into the past, of his connection, however brief, to peaches.

You see, I think these connections to our past selves is important. I think many, if not most of us are swimming in a sea of newness, without connection to what many events over thousands and millions of years conspired to bring us to this moment, with this combination of elements which allow us to survive and thrive.

So, I have delayed the telling of how I lost the peach. It was because I moved, and I had a few years where I had no room for a full tree, plus the floors in my home are now formica over concrete. And, I used a bare tree branch for a tree, "My Christmas twig" I called it, and it was easy to brush past and bump, knocking an ornament off it's tenuous little hook on twig. If that ornament were made of thin glass, and hit a hard surface, that is the end of it. So, I lost a peach, and a favorite blue glitter pine cone that way. Se la vie.

Maybe loosing long saved ornaments is part of the practice, a zen kind of opportunity. The chance to let go of the material world, even when one has infused it with all kinds of sentiment and meaning. Maybe this is truly advance training for the bigger stuff. The heart break of loosing loved ones, the ultimate experience of having to accept and let go, as we all have to do at some point, inevitably, inexorably and unequivocally.

 My ornaments, my existential teachers. I will make new ones, find others, do with less and carefully love what I have left in my meager little Christmas box of life.

6th Period Reading Class

ELD room at the High School in a smallish town,
Tim O"Brien is the subject on the page, his book,
"The Things They Carried" - so poignant for me,
I was their age, 13, 14, 15 when Vietnam
was a place of misery and death
for my generation at the mercy,
of my parents generation.
 how to translate, to people who were 4 when the
Twin Towers went down in that apocalyptic cloud of smoke.

I gather my courage in response to the quiet apathy of these
who are the reading challenged, who come to class and zone out,
Who read words which are only words, empty of inspiration
Who do not know yet how to ask, because they do not envision
the questions yet.

For ten minutes I speak -
Of the men in my life and their own war stories.

Louis, my quiet grandfather
Driving his horse cart in France, age of 19,
the cart full of supplies
and he stops at a stream for water to bring the horses
while he is away, a bomb destroys the cart

And his son, alive then because his father survived
the war to end all wars
Robert becomes a navigator
flying planes to drop bombs
On targets in Japan.


My brother, alive because these fathers survived these world
wars,
he becomes a pacifist,
even as the draft lottery has his name at 18
registered or jail

56,000 of my generation perished in that one.

The students stopped their fidgeting, their eyes focused in my direction
It is dangerous to speak of politics,
but a story paints a picture,
A story carries the listener
makes the speaker human.
They listened, quietly for the first time in that hour.
A truth fell upon the room like a soft blanket.
A pretense was pulled away.

And when I came to the end, I hardly knew what I had said,
as though the spirit had take over,
and all the words flowed from some other consciousness,
from some deep pain of the recent Iraqi amputee,
from the old Vets for Peace who were not allowed
 to march in the Auburn Veterans Day
parade,
from William Stafford, and all the men
who dared to be the rare CO's
in WWII - The " just" war.

From the young vets now, only the age of my sons,
committing suicide or drowning in alcohol
It came, from a higher place and
The wounded and dead helped me tell it.

I only hope to honor them
by breaking the cycle
somehow
someday
by
telling
stories.