A Crocheted Mailbox, The Texas Armadillo, and Other Christmisfits
Posted in Chatter
(Chatter Letter from the Editor, December 2011)
My mother is notorious for keeping every single ornament she has ever had the privilege of owning. She’s not a collector, really, and calling her an ornament hoarder would be crass; if anything, she is an ornament Advocate. She advocates on behalf of the broken angel, the faceless snowman, the decaying circa-1982 macaroni snowflake. Through the years it has become a running joke that the boxes of ornaments at my parents’ house get more plentiful even as the viable ornament options get smaller and smaller. When I was a child, this collection of misfit Christmas tree ornaments hovered between 5 and 10 specimens; we just laughed at them scornfully and hung them around back. Unless, of course, it was OUR Sunday school creation in which case it had an extenuating circumstance that demanded it be front and center, right below the Texas Armadillo. (I have no idea why the Texas Armadillo was, and is, a family ornament. It should be “ornamentation” for the grill of a beat-up station wagon, not Christmas décor.) But as the years have rolled by, the ornaments left in their wake have grown as numerous as the grains of sand on the seashore. We’re talking Old Testament proportions.
There’s the felt rocking horse head with the candy cane body. His one good googly eye fell off years ago and my name is scrawled in barely-there black Sharpie. There’s a multicolored crocheted mailbox (obscure, right?) that has no real hook or ribbon from which to hang so you just have to perch it on a branch and hope it stays put. There’s the most hideous felt manger scene that hangs from a sparkly pipe cleaner; who knew the floor of the Christ Child’s stable was plush neon green? There are a few ornaments made of pecan shells. There is candy older than me mummified in antique foil and caught up in petrified glue and hanging from frayed ribbon.
The shoeboxes these ornaments call home look like coffins in miniature, small sepulchers of Christmases past. Pulling them out and revisiting their contents year after year feels like grave robbery, but it mostly feels like visiting a very old and senile friend — someone who can be funny and dear but who you might be embarrassed to sit with at a bustling Starbucks. But the worst ornament display by far was the Christmas my dad ran out of light strands for the tree; defeated and tired, he covered it top-to-bottom in a giant net of shrubbery lights. This made the noble fir look like a catch of fish, the brave little ornaments shining like trout bellies behind the netting.
Gordon and I got married in December. When we got home from our honeymoon just days before Christmas, we entered our new apartment and discovered that my parents had set up a little tree in a little corner and covered it with the little jingle bells that chimed for our getaway car. I thought, “Hey, it’s the beginning of my very own little ornament landfill.” But then I couldn’t wait to get to Container Store and start hoarding — er, advocating — on my own terms, with my own stuff.
Christmas ornaments are not just pieces of plastic or painted glass. They’re little preserved moments, little lasting impressions of a former time, little souvenirs from trips taken over the course of a long life, little promises we love to hear again. If someone were to snatch your ornaments and told you to start from scratch, how could you do anything but just stare at your empty tree? And the tree wouldn’t be of any help, because all this time you have been the one defining it. You and the tree would just stare at each other, and both of you would think, “Well, I guess one of us better start making friends, or falling in love, or having babies.” Because more than moments, impressions, souvenirs, or promises, ornaments really represent people, and I think this is why it’s so hard for my mother to get rid of a single one.
Let me tell you a little secret: the people in my mother’s life are not perfect and they never have been. I happen to know that the fourth-grader who made the felt horse in 1991 was whiny and melodramatic. I don’t know who crocheted the mailbox, but they obviously had bleak romantic sensibilities and little Christmas spirit. And don’t even get me started on the Texas Armadillo.
Every Christmas my siblings and I are slightly embarrassed of my parents’ tree, but I know if my mother ever decided to chunk the whole lot of ornaments and hire a decorator, we would all feel betrayed; it would be as though our infant selves and our childhood selves and our adolescent selves had been unplugged like a net of lights. It’s humbling that old conglomerations of pasta and sequins are our life-line to a real sense of memory, but it’s true. We may be broken, chintzy, faded, dusty, kitschy and campy, but my mother loved us anyway, still does, and won’t ever let us forget it as long as there is Christmas.
I’m grateful the Christ Child feels the same way. Aren’t you?
Julie
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