To conjure up Christmas in the first quarter of July requires mental gymnastics on the part of both writer and reader. Together we must pause, reflect, and then pitch ourselves like time-travelers into the past, summoning up various images: the jostling crowds at the mall, the fresh cold air, carolers with thin piping voices singing their hearts out in nursing homes, the lights winking on trees seen through living room windows, the radio stations playing Christmas songs ad nauseam, baking and decorating cookies, lines at the post office, the annual family newsletter from a distant relation we haven’t seen in fifteen years, the various church services, that special Christmas spirit which prevails in the rush of days leading to the event itself. As I say, recapturing those impressions while sitting in an air-conditioned room with the shades drawn against a blazing sun demands a willed imagination.
In our home, until her death, my wife was the primary celebrant of all holidays. For Independence Day, she dressed herself and the children in red, white, and blue, lined the walkway with small American flags, and delighted like a child in the fireworks at Lake Junaluska. Thanksgiving brought more than turkey and dressing as Kris decked the house with posters of Pilgrims and statues of turkeys. Easter and Halloween meant the traditional baskets and egg hunts, costumes and trick-or-treating, yes, but again out from the attic came more pictures and posters, bunny rabbits, plastic pumpkins, and other paraphernalia.
But Christmas—this was for Kris the Olympics of all holidays. Box after box emerged from the attic. Bear in mind that we lived in the Palmer House, our bed-and-breakfast, with twenty-two rooms available for adornment, a feature that Kris doubtless counted as one of the great features of that drafty old barn of a building. I can say without exaggeration that she placed some form of decoration in each of these rooms. Once some committee or another selected our home for the Annual Waynesville Christmas Tour, an honor Kris greeted with utter delight, particularly since the committee also sent a professional decorator to help with the preparations. I readily confess that I, too, was happy with the decorator, as his presence allowed me to slip into the background, ignored and largely forgotten in the ensuing hubbub.
Now, back to those boxes. From those cardboard repositories of Christmases past Kris retrieved her lifelong collection of decorations: ornaments; string after string of lights; posters; special cards; three separate crèches; holiday plates; cookie tins; wall hangings, one of which, an awful cloth reindeer’s head, I still own simply because she loved it so; the skirts for two Christmas trees, one natural and one artificial; fake ivy for the stairwell bannisters; miniature Christmas trees; and Santa hats. She even owned a bathroom Santa rug and a Santa designed for the cover of the toilet seat, which always seemed more humiliation than honor to good old Kris Kringle.
By the time she finished placing these objects all around the house, you would have thought, were you visiting, that you had stepped into Santa’s workshop. (One note here: Kris was not Martha Stewart. She decorated without dusting a single shelf or tabletop, a practice that drove me, as the neat freak in our marriage, round the bend and up the river.)
The crowning glory of these decorations was her collection of tree ornaments. In addition to making some ornaments herself, Kris shopped for them throughout the year. If we visited the Outer Banks in June, she’d buy a special ornament marking the occasion. If on our travels to homeschool fairs to sell books she happened across a Christmas shop, she’d commemorate the trip with an ornament. Around the middle of December up would go the tree and on it would go the lights and then the ornaments, one after the other until the tree glittered like some triangular fantasia of gemstones. Topping off this sparkling menagerie was the Christmas angel with her porcelain eighteenth century face, her pink gown covered by delicate white lace, and her string of pearls.
After Kris’s death, I tried to keep up these traditions, though in moderation. Many of the decorations I left in their boxes, or else gave to my children when they moved away, married, and established their own homes. But the Christmas tree was required, de rigueur, absolutely necessary. My son and I would travel to the Farmer’s Market here in Asheville, select a tree that would fit the apartment, haul it home strapped to the roof the car, and swathe it in lights and gaudy baubles.
By their very nature, Christmas trees tend to remain anonymous. By that I mean we usually don’t hold a particular tree in high regard, remarking ten years after its curbside death, “Well, that was the noblest of trees, wasn’t it?” or “Remember that tree we had ten years ago? Now THAT was a tree!” Who remembers with affection some particular Frasier fur? They tend to be all alike, tous pareils, as the French might put it. (For readers who do recall with affection certain trees, I apologize for my remarks. We are very different in this regard, you and I.)
This particular tree was in the apartment less than a week when I noticed tiny stinkbugs in odd places around our Cumberland apartment. The weather was warmer than normal, so I wasn’t surprised by the stinkbugs so much as by their small size. After close examination, I deemed them adolescent stinkbugs, arrogant little hoodlums intent on moving bag and baggage into my territory. I could almost see them smirking at me as they walked across the floor. For days I kept moving shelves away from the walls, looking for their nests, assuming stinkbugs inhabited nests. Across certain doorways I affixed double-sided tape, and though this invention trapped a few of the little devils, they kept appearing.
Then came Christmas morning. Jeremy and I had unwrapped all but the last of the presents, a gift bag with my name on it. I pulled the paper from the top of the bag, and in doing so, bumped against the tree. Following that collision, at the bottom of the bag, scuttling around like Santa’s elves if Santa’s elves were insects, were half-a-dozen of the critters. A light bulb popped above my head, as in a cartoon, and an inspection with a magnifying glass of the limbs of the Christmas tree solved the mystery of the last two weeks. There they were, scores and scores, hundreds and hundreds, of tiny stinkbugs, all clinging to the limbs as if for dear life, waiting only for the stinkbug signal to rise up and take control of my home.
Within the hour, Jeremy and I had removed the decorations and lights from the tree, opened the door off my porch, carried the tree through the door, and hurled it to the ground two floors below, where I then dragged the infested carcass to the curb. Any neighbors witnessing this act surely judged me the Scrooge of Cumberland Avenue.
When Christmas rolled round the following year, I was dismally contemplating a trip to the Farmer’s Market when the potted palm in my living room caught my eye. Again the light bulb above my head appeared. That same day, I ran a string of lights through the palm fronds, threw a few ornaments on the string and the fronds, draped a holiday tree skirt over the dirt and the pot, and called it Christmas.
Eat your heart out, Charlie Brown.
But Christmas—this was for Kris the Olympics of all holidays. Box after box emerged from the attic. Bear in mind that we lived in the Palmer House, our bed-and-breakfast, with twenty-two rooms available for adornment, a feature that Kris doubtless counted as one of the great features of that drafty old barn of a building. I can say without exaggeration that she placed some form of decoration in each of these rooms. Once some committee or another selected our home for the Annual Waynesville Christmas Tour, an honor Kris greeted with utter delight, particularly since the committee also sent a professional decorator to help with the preparations. I readily confess that I, too, was happy with the decorator, as his presence allowed me to slip into the background, ignored and largely forgotten in the ensuing hubbub.
Now, back to those boxes. From those cardboard repositories of Christmases past Kris retrieved her lifelong collection of decorations: ornaments; string after string of lights; posters; special cards; three separate crèches; holiday plates; cookie tins; wall hangings, one of which, an awful cloth reindeer’s head, I still own simply because she loved it so; the skirts for two Christmas trees, one natural and one artificial; fake ivy for the stairwell bannisters; miniature Christmas trees; and Santa hats. She even owned a bathroom Santa rug and a Santa designed for the cover of the toilet seat, which always seemed more humiliation than honor to good old Kris Kringle.
By the time she finished placing these objects all around the house, you would have thought, were you visiting, that you had stepped into Santa’s workshop. (One note here: Kris was not Martha Stewart. She decorated without dusting a single shelf or tabletop, a practice that drove me, as the neat freak in our marriage, round the bend and up the river.)
The crowning glory of these decorations was her collection of tree ornaments. In addition to making some ornaments herself, Kris shopped for them throughout the year. If we visited the Outer Banks in June, she’d buy a special ornament marking the occasion. If on our travels to homeschool fairs to sell books she happened across a Christmas shop, she’d commemorate the trip with an ornament. Around the middle of December up would go the tree and on it would go the lights and then the ornaments, one after the other until the tree glittered like some triangular fantasia of gemstones. Topping off this sparkling menagerie was the Christmas angel with her porcelain eighteenth century face, her pink gown covered by delicate white lace, and her string of pearls.
After Kris’s death, I tried to keep up these traditions, though in moderation. Many of the decorations I left in their boxes, or else gave to my children when they moved away, married, and established their own homes. But the Christmas tree was required, de rigueur, absolutely necessary. My son and I would travel to the Farmer’s Market here in Asheville, select a tree that would fit the apartment, haul it home strapped to the roof the car, and swathe it in lights and gaudy baubles.
By their very nature, Christmas trees tend to remain anonymous. By that I mean we usually don’t hold a particular tree in high regard, remarking ten years after its curbside death, “Well, that was the noblest of trees, wasn’t it?” or “Remember that tree we had ten years ago? Now THAT was a tree!” Who remembers with affection some particular Frasier fur? They tend to be all alike, tous pareils, as the French might put it. (For readers who do recall with affection certain trees, I apologize for my remarks. We are very different in this regard, you and I.)
This particular tree was in the apartment less than a week when I noticed tiny stinkbugs in odd places around our Cumberland apartment. The weather was warmer than normal, so I wasn’t surprised by the stinkbugs so much as by their small size. After close examination, I deemed them adolescent stinkbugs, arrogant little hoodlums intent on moving bag and baggage into my territory. I could almost see them smirking at me as they walked across the floor. For days I kept moving shelves away from the walls, looking for their nests, assuming stinkbugs inhabited nests. Across certain doorways I affixed double-sided tape, and though this invention trapped a few of the little devils, they kept appearing.
Then came Christmas morning. Jeremy and I had unwrapped all but the last of the presents, a gift bag with my name on it. I pulled the paper from the top of the bag, and in doing so, bumped against the tree. Following that collision, at the bottom of the bag, scuttling around like Santa’s elves if Santa’s elves were insects, were half-a-dozen of the critters. A light bulb popped above my head, as in a cartoon, and an inspection with a magnifying glass of the limbs of the Christmas tree solved the mystery of the last two weeks. There they were, scores and scores, hundreds and hundreds, of tiny stinkbugs, all clinging to the limbs as if for dear life, waiting only for the stinkbug signal to rise up and take control of my home.
Within the hour, Jeremy and I had removed the decorations and lights from the tree, opened the door off my porch, carried the tree through the door, and hurled it to the ground two floors below, where I then dragged the infested carcass to the curb. Any neighbors witnessing this act surely judged me the Scrooge of Cumberland Avenue.
When Christmas rolled round the following year, I was dismally contemplating a trip to the Farmer’s Market when the potted palm in my living room caught my eye. Again the light bulb above my head appeared. That same day, I ran a string of lights through the palm fronds, threw a few ornaments on the string and the fronds, draped a holiday tree skirt over the dirt and the pot, and called it Christmas.
Eat your heart out, Charlie Brown.
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