Yesterday I spent almost three hours taking down and storing all the Christmas decorations, which included the balsam tree with its hundreds of ornaments, the fiber optic tree in the sun room, the five wreaths, the miles of garland on the staircase banister and elsewhere, many china Santas, sprigs of holly, branches of balsam with pine cones, and displays of seasonal greeting cards received for 2011. I guess the house looked something like a gorged gift shop that would send anyone with an aversion to Christmas into some sort of mental breakdown. I admit it. Christmas makes me more sentimental than any other time of year does. I get emotionally high during the season with all its warmth, visual beauty, and fellowship with friends and family. When it ends, and I put away the last ornament, I feel a temporary emptiness that has to be eliminated through endeavors like giving dinner parties for those gray post-holiday weeks until spring.The end of the season is especially tough this year, due mostly to my sister’s death in May of 2011. She was the last member of my immediate family besides me, the last who would remember all those shared family experiences, not only the yuletide ones from childhood, but a past of fifty-eight years of shared joy and grief that still make me want to pick up the phone to call Connie to laugh hysterically from her wonderful sense of humor or just to remember past events from a point of view that is also mine. It isn’t a feeling of actual depression, because there is always something to take my mind and heart to other projects and goals, but it was nonetheless painful this year to put ornaments my family had had since the 1940’s back into boxes and onto shelves in the basement.
There is one ornament in particular that is sad to store away. It’s a Father Christmas figure made for me in 1988 by my Indiana friend Ronee Luttringer, the sister-in-law of my good friend Linda Luttringer. Ronee poured the plaster-cast Santa and then painted it. There is something melancholy in his face that seems to say, “Well, another Christmas is over. Time to go back into my box until next year. It’s been fun, and I’ll see you again next year.” I know how irrational that must sound, and I am aware that he is made of plaster and paint, but as the years roll by, the chances of my being here decrease, as they do for everyone else. That fact doesn’t bring a sense of fear or dread, only deep feelings of the temporary quality of life. The good part is that there is each year an increased appreciation of life as a miraculous gift along with the knowledge that if I’m still here for Christmas of 2012, I’ll be happily unpacking all those reminders and symbols of a season that never fails to energize and inspire, despite inevitable goodbyes along the way. So...I’ll be planning a dinner party soon. There will be good food, wine, good friends, lots of laughter, sharing, and the kind of good cheer from Christmas that need never really be packed away on shelves for the rest of the year, but enjoyed whenever we wish. JB
