Category Archives: Holiday

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Holiday

Christmas Miscellany 2025

With Christmas ending tomorrow, there’s still time for me to post a few more photos from the season, including our church’s live nativity on the afternoon of December 24.  It’s a blessing and a pleasure to reconnect annually with this sweet group of friendly beasts.  The burrow and small black ox were laser-focused this year on eating as much hay has possible.  

Moses the camel, though, was as outgoing, patient and good-tempered as ever.  He nuzzled in for selfies and welcomed the hugs and caresses of curious children of all ages.  If you’ve heard that camels are known to spit, that’s correct.  But they spit when annoyed or threatened, and Moses is apparently always in a good mood, at least at our event.  

Another two friendly, very quiet beasts : papier-mâché reindeer keep watch out a front window at my mother’s house.  

Also at my mother’s, miniature decorations for one of my miniature houses. 

Again at my mother’s house, caroler candles surround a loving polar bear family and a Santa on skis.  The candles more faded in color date from around 1940.  They were a Christmas gift from a beloved family friend to Mama as a child.  

She remembers excitedly opening the small red box, which she still has.  The candles were a product of the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, which through various mergers, currently exists as Exxon-Mobil. The label reads “4 Small Choirboys,”  but Mama’s set seems to contain three boys and a girl.  My mother insisted on lighting the girl candle, which quickly melted and shrunk, much to her childhood regret.  

I inherited the task of making gingerbread cookies for a dear friend of my mother’s.  He ships his highly anticipated peanut brittle up from Atlanta in exchange.  

A well-bundled and bushy-bearded Father Christmas, a years-ago gift from a friend, stands sentry on the walnut dresser in our front hall.  

Also at our house, the holy family camps out for the season atop a bookcase in the family room.  

The Magi with their richly adorned camel approach from atop the armoire on a neighboring wall.  Their arrival to worship the baby Jesus is commemorated in the Christian calendar as Epiphany, on January 6, the final day of Christmas.   

As is our custom, tomorrow will be the last night of our exterior holiday illumination.  The little lights throughout the house, though, remain until I remove them.  Every year, I seem to need the comfort of their warm glow a bit longer.  

For now, though, and through tomorrow, it’s still Christmas.  

May the light and love of Christmas continue to touch our hearts and move us to kindness and mercy, long after the festive bulbs shut off.  

Family, Holiday, Memorials

A Christmas Tree, Decked in Memories

Early in December, my husband asked if he should bring up my mother’s Christmas tree. And, he suggested, why not put it in the corner of her family room, where she could see it all day long from her favorite TV-watching chair? Sounds good, I agreed. But I wasn’t expecting this full-sized tree. Since the move from Atlanta eight years ago, it had been lying forlornly in pieces in a back corner of her basement. With Mama’s approval, in years past I’d decorated a smaller table-top tree in her dining room. She had to make a special circuit around the house to see it, but she said it gave her a reason to take a walk. I thought the bigger tree’s days as a host for decoration were well in the past. But with a few adjustments and several new strings of lights, it was rejuvenated. When my mother came downstairs to find the tree opposite her cozy day-time spot, she was as happy as a well-loved child on Christmas morning. It was the prettiest tree ever, she declared.

The last time I’d decorated this particular tree was in December 2015, in my childhood home, for what was to be my father’s final Christmas.  After decades of good health and keeping fit, the years had finally begun to catch up with him.  The previous few months had been rough, with an illness and a hospitalization.  Neither he nor Mama felt up to the task of what had in the past been a beloved activity, so I flew to Atlanta for a short tree-decorating trip.  Daddy attempted no hanging of ornaments, but he sat near me as I worked.  He radiated a sense of relaxed contentment during those few days.  He watched with interest as I unpacked all the many old ornaments, each one familiar, most of them prompting an origin story.

There were the music-making pinecone elves on skis, purchased in the early 60s on a rare day-after Thanksgiving shopping trip with Mama’s sister and her family in St. Matthews, KY, near Louisville.  

There was the was last remaining unsilvered ornament from the war years, when metal was reserved for military use: a red blown-glass ball with a cardboard cap and paper string hanger.  

And there was Mama’s favorite decoration of all, the cardboard stocking covered in silver foil.  It had been bought by her dear brother when he was a boy, around 1940.  During my mother’s childhood, she had regarded Edwin, six years her senior, with absolute and wholehearted devotion.  His premature death at age forty-four, from complications of alcoholism, has been one of the great sadnesses of her life.  

There were the many homemade ornaments we created for our tree and as gifts: the clothespin toy soldiers, assorted animals sewn out of felt, and the pasta angels that Daddy himself made in the 1980s.  Shortly after his retirement, he embarked on an exuberant crafting phase.  Most years I get at least one texted photo from a friend showing one of our family-made treasures on their tree, with a note remarking on how it never fails to spark warm thoughts of both my parents.     

I don’t think there was a single Christmas ornament that Daddy didn’t appreciate.  I smile to think how he basked so cheerfully that day  in the glow of the lights, how he commented with such enthusiasm.   “This  little bear in a vest is the cutest thing! Here’s your Kindergarten bell!  I love this jack-in-the-box mouse you made!” He never lost his characteristic childlike delight in the beauty and charm of small things, nor his willingness to express it.  

Back home in Virginia, during every call home that Christmas season and well into January, both my parents thanked me for my decorating efforts.  “Your father has a favorite Christmas activity now, ” Mama told me.  “He sits by the tree, looking peaceful and happy.”  

 

*Did I return to take down the tree?  I can’t recall, but I fear that I did not.  

Family, Holiday, Nature

Winter Solstice 2025

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Darkness descends early on  this winter solstice day.  But we’ve filled our home with our customary little white lights for the season, and so the early nightfall brings  with it a welcome coziness.  It’s the perfect atmosphere for my favorite holiday activity, staying in with those I love!

Happy Winter Solstice, friends! 

Holiday, Nature

December Scenes

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Yet again, I find it hard to believe that the end of the year is fast approaching.  Clearly time is moving faster than it did in my youth.  But most of our holiday decorating is done, at our house and next door at my mother’s, and we’re on our second light December snow.  It’s been looking like Christmas, I realize, for a couple of weeks.  And with temperatures well below freezing, treacherous icy surfaces and biting winds, it certainly feels like winter.  So, here are a few pre-Christmas scenes from our little bit of the arctic known as Northern Virginia.  

Christmas is nine days away!

Family, Friendship, Holiday, Nature

Forest Bathing with the Skeleton Crew

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Since the beginning of October, our family has been enjoying the active company, once again, of our old family friend Slim and his loyal pack of pups. They spent the past eleven months mostly in quiet contemplation and sound sleep in their comfortable new domain, my attic art studio.  Sometimes as I went upstairs to paint, I’d find them peering out from their favorite lookout perch in one of the dormers. Slim kept a pair of binoculars close at hand, along with his birding journal.

One morning in August, when our family was in Cape Cod, they were roused from napping by the sound of heavy machinery.  From the attic window, they witnessed the removal of our old silver maple.  It was with great sadness that they watched as the remainder of the tree was cut down, chipped up and hauled away.  Slim and I are kindred spirits in our love of trees.  He brushed a tear from his eye as he told me that he wept most of that summer morning.  

Once the pack was feeling lively enough to venture outside to roam the grounds, they headed directly to the site of the old tree.  “Hello, dear pal,”  Slim said, as he settled himself in the center of the mulch pile.  “I can still breathe in your essence, your goodness!”   

Somehow it was news to me that Slim was an early adopter of the practice of “forest bathing.” He was introduced to the therapeutic relaxation technique during the months he spent backpacking through Japan in the early 80s. It’s one of several lifestyle choices that he holds responsible for his health, vigor, trim frame, and longevity. As we walked over to the remaining silver maple in our yard, he became my forest bathing instructor. “Get up close to this old friend,” he advised me. “Snuggle in, nice and cozy. Lean your back against the bark. Feel that solid, reassuring presence. Imagine that your feet are roots. Take deep breaths. Be aware of all your senses. Listen to the birds, watch the beetle crawling among the fallen leaves, feel the breeze on your face, and smell all those fantastic fragrances of nature. Keep breathing, slowly, deeply. ”

The practice is a great stress reducer, but it’s more than that, Slim told me.  “It’s those phytoncides, you know.”  I didn’t know.  “They’re tree oils, great immune boosters.  We breathe them in, and they have amazing healing properties.  The more trees around, the better.  That’s why they call it forest bathing.  But we can get big benefits right here, in the company of our silver maple sister, and even from the mulch chips of her much reduced sibling.”  I’ve known Slim long enough to reach eagerly for the pearls of wisdom he offers.  I’ve always enjoyed being around trees, but now I know to seek them out more intentionally when life’s annoyances, large and small, start to wear on me.  I expect there will be many of those times.     

Slim delighted in the last of the squirrel-planted sunflowers that bloom along the fencerow.  

He exulted in the clump of late-blooming Montauk daisies by my mother’s driveway.  “These smell almost as good as a maple tree!,” Slim exclaimed. “Flower bathing has its benefits, too!”  

 

 

Community, Family, Holiday, Parenthood

Mother’s Day, 2025

My mother with my daughter, at age 2 1/2, in Atlanta.

To all the women who do the loving work of mothering, whether to your own child or children, and/or to other family members and friends, human and non, thank you! Our troubled world needs your care, courage and kindness. May you feel cherished and appreciated on this day and every day!

Happy Mother’s Day!

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Holiday

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas. . .

The Christmas season always speeds by, but with every year, it zips past at a faster pace. This year especially, it’s a blur. Is it the lack of that extra week, due to Thanksgiving’s later date? That our daughter wasn’t with us for quite as long? Is it my advancing age? It certainly does seem that time moves more and more quickly the older I get.

My husband, who is younger, agrees.   We find ourselves looking at the Christmas tree after dinner and marveling at the fact that December 25 and its accompanying festivities are all in the rear view mirror. We did the usual decorative preparations–the indoor/outdoor lighting, the wreaths, a small forest of Christmas trees at our house and my mother’s. We shopped for our family and and others, we wrapped gifts. We enjoyed a celebratory pre-Christmas dinner out with our daughter and her fiance. Post-Christmas, our two families walked and talked through an extensive light show at a local garden park. Of course, there was the not-to-be missed Live Nativity and Christmas Eve worship service. We opened gifts and shared Christmas dinner with my mother.  No crucial elements were missing. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention? Not living in the moment? Looking back, it seems as though I was too busy to be mindful.

And then, yesterday, on the final day of Christmas, it snowed.  A big, beautiful, drifting snow.  Now it really looks like Christmas.  And it just so happens that I have time to breathe in and out fully, and to enjoy that Christmas feeling.  No appointments, no projects that must be tackled immediately.  Now, I can be present.

So, at a point at which most people are taking down their Christmas decorations, or have boxed them up days ago, I will be savoring them. 

My husband is typically not one for issuing decrees.  He’s never played the bossy guy with me, as he knows it would do him no good.  But he has decreed that January 6th must be the final evening for the outdoor spotlights and interior window candles.  This is a stretch for him.  Growing up, his family took down the tree down sometimes even before they ushered in the new year.  Although a church-goer all his life, he wasn’t aware, until I informed him, of the tradition of leaving the decorations up until Epiphany.  We can’t turn the lights out until the Magi arrive!  How will they find the baby Jesus without simulated stars to guide them? 

My husband fears that without his guidance, I’d leave the decorations up until Easter.  But I wouldn’t.  They’d be out before Valentine’s Day.  I may attempt to negotiate a few extra days with the exterior lights and the candles.  Because with the snow, the illuminated house looks extra pretty.  I could say that.  Or because it’s the middle of the week, when his days are spent at the office.  He’d probably rather not spend an evening packing up the candles, right?  (He puts them up, and he takes them down.)

I’ll probably let him get his way with the lights that are in his charge.  But all the other interior lights and decorations–those are in my purview.  With those, I’ll take my time.  I’ll relish this white Christmas in the post-Christmas season.