Category Archives: Holiday

More Exercises in Extreme Gift Wrapping

Two years ago, I wrote about my husband’s flair for imaginative gift-wrapping.  (See Exercises in Extreme Gift Wrapping, December 2011.) H was born into a family of happy wrappers.  One of the pillars of their holiday tradition is the inventive wrapping of every single gift, no matter how large or small, no matter how humble.  A bracelet might be hidden in a box sized for an appliance.  If an object has a recognizable shape, it’s typically disguised in another box.  Multiple containers are frequently employed.  The family name is undoubtedly enshrined in a place of prominence in the gift-wrap hall of fame. 
My family’s approach to gift wrapping, on the other hand, may be described as practical and decorative.  Certainly, compared to H’s family, we are wrapping minimalists.  But then most of the world would be, as well.  I was unprepared for the sea of multi-colored gifts that flooded the living room on our first Christmas together at H’s parents’ house.

 

My husband has continued the tradition in his own way.  He no longer feels the need to wrap up a pair of socks in a refrigerator box simply to fill out the gift-scape under the tree.  His approach emphasizes visual impact and imaginative packaging.  In 2011, he enclosed three gifts for our daughter in large cylindrical tubes intended for setting concrete.  Last Christmas and this year, he followed up with gifts of strikingly unusual shape.   

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On the morning of Christmas Eve 2012, a modest triangular package appeared under the tree.  The tag read, “To D, from Mama and Daddy.”  Our daughter was thrilled to see that Daddy had been busy again down in the basement, working on a new packaging scheme.  She suspected that the pyramid would be only the first of a series of mysterious packages.  She was right, of course.

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On Christmas morning, the silver pyramid had become one of the arms of a five-pointed star, the center of which was a pentagon-shaped box.  Each point contained a small gift, while the pentagon encased a more substantial present.  Really, though, the items inside the boxes were almost incidental.  The real gifts here were the surprise factor, followed by the intricate process of unwrapping, a sustained big reveal.

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Above, our daughter sits among the unwrapped elements, the hinged plywood boxes my husband carefully constructed to form the star.  His engineering training and math skills equipped him for the endeavor. 

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This year, a slender, four-foot tall pyramid turned up by the tree a few days before Christmas.  The package prompted my daughter to respond in kind with a last-minute present we had for H.  The gift was in a long, narrow box.  She disguised the shape by adding a gable-like projection at the top.  No doubt about it, she’s her father’s daughter.  Although she claims it was unintended, she was nevertheless proud that her creation turned out to be just slightly taller than H’s pyramid.

On Christmas Eve, I awakened to the startling sound of drilling coming from under the bed.  I assumed H was busy working his holiday magic.  Once downstairs, I found an oversized blue Christmas orb suspended from the ceiling.  On Christmas morning, the final element of the mobile appeared: a silver-wrapped ring, about the size of a pool life-saver.

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The uniquely shaped items, as always, were saved for last.  The pyramid was another neatly hinged plywood box, large enough for D to sit inside.  The silver ring turned out to be a section of pool noodle, taped together, with a tiny gift wedged inside.  The blue Christmas ball was purely decorative.  H was pleased with D’s clever and meticulous wrapping of his gift.  He’s delighted to know that in his daughter’s hands, the family tradition of extreme gift-wrapping has a sure future. 

More Thoughts on Old-Time Trees and Trappings

As I think more about the photos of our first, unfortunate Georgia tree (see previous post), I understand better why it looked the way it did.  When my parents were growing up in small Kentucky towns, Christmas trees weren’t big business.  They were barely any business.  Getting a tree was an exclusively do-it-yourself endeavor.  Choices were limited, and the ideal of the perfect, cone-shaped tree didn’t exist, at least not in those rural areas. Maybe the fashionable Seelbach Hotel in Louisville decorated a neat, Tannenbaum-style fir, but then again, maybe not.  My mother remembers her father and brothers going out in the fields on their land in central Kentucky and bringing back a tree they’d cut themselves.  Daddy, from an Ohio river town in the northeast part of the state, recalls going with his dad farther up into the holler and chopping down a tree.  They got what was available, what they could cut, what they could haul.   Throughout Kentucky, in those years, the typical Christmas tree was a cedar.  Bushy and lacking much definable shape, their branches were fine, thin and fragrant.

 

It was only after they were married that my parents exchanged money for a Christmas tree.  As my mother remembers, they bought the first tree for their new house in Lexington from an old man who sold cedars he cut himself.   The photo below dates from 1964 and shows a full but rather ungainly cedar that was the standard of my early childhood.

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On Christmas morning in our house in Lexington, my hair still in rag-tied curls, I’m happily discovering Santa’s gifts of a “Debbie Eve” baby doll and a cradle.  We would head to my grandparents’ later in the day, for Christmas dinner.

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Christmas Eve, 1965, with Mama in the living room of my grandparents’ house.  Our smiles appear to be heartfelt.  We were right where we wanted to be.

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Christmas morning, 1965, at my grandparents’ house.
I’m in the new red corduroy housecoat Mama made me, holding my new doll Amy.  In my cloudy half-memories, this was a perfect Christmas day.  

Oh…Eww…Christmas Tree!

We had planned to get our Christmas tree last Sunday after church.  (We put up several artificial trees in early December, but wait until mid-month on the real tree.) At breakfast that morning, our daughter recounted the dream she’d been having upon waking: H and I had decided to surprise her by going out for the tree while she slept.  By the time she came downstairs, we had it set up and decorated.  It was not a good-looking tree.  D tried to hide her disappointment in not being included in the tree outing, in our choice of an unfortunate tree, in its awkward placement, and in our bad decorating.  When she reached out to touch it, the trunk collapsed in on itself like a patio umbrella stand.  It had been tall and ugly; now it was short and ugly.  Once fully awake, she was greatly relieved to find no tree at all in the living room.

 
Her dream reminded me of some old photos from my childhood featuring particularly unsightly Christmas trees.  D had seen them before, but had forgotten, so the impact was strong.

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These photos have mystified me for years.  They were taken in our first house in Atlanta, a little rental ranch in the Montreal Woods section of Tucker.  When I think back on the Christmases of my childhood and teen years, I set them in the home we bought two years later, in the Morningside area.  As I remember, it was graced annually with a nicely shaped, well-decorated tree, usually a Frazier fir.   Why, then, were these trees, from the more distant past, so very ugly?

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Upon recent re-examination of the photos, I assumed they showed two different, but equally unattractive trees, from consecutive years.  (Dates on our family photos are often missing or erroneous.) The first captures a hulking, bushy tree.  I look up at it with awed trepidation.  In the second, I sit forlornly beside a presence that resembles a raggedy, monstrous figure, small-waisted and large-hipped.  The broad expanse of blank white wall adds a further degree of bleakness.

Then I noticed that in another picture of the monster tree, I’m wearing the same black dress and blue barrettes as in the bushy-tree photo.  Could we really have had two such sad-looking trees in the same year?  Was the first so terrible that we took it down and swapped it for another, late in the season, when the pickings were even slimmer?  Maybe the first one kept falling over?  (I have vague memories of toppling trees on rickety stands.)  Or maybe the needles dried out within a few days?  I phoned my parents to see if they could offer any clarification.   They didn’t think we ever had two trees in a single year.  They did remember that we had some less than stellar trees in the Tucker years.

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It had to be the same tree, one with the added distinction of looking bad in various ways depending upon the angle from which it was viewed.  The same ornaments appeared in similar spots; the same aluminum-foil tinsel was draped haphazardly over long-needled branches.  In the photo above, Mama and I seem to be trying to put on a good show, to pretend gamely that we’re perfectly content in the presence of this strange tree.  Here we are, happy and well-dressed, holding these gifts expectantly.  We could be a family on a Christmas card.

Mama’s memory of that tree was as hazy as mine, but other details of that season she recalled vividly.  Ever since she and my father had married, they had spent Christmas with her family in central Kentucky.  My birth hadn’t changed this; Christmas would find us in the farmhouse with my grandparents, surrounded by aunts and uncles.  But that year, after our move to Georgia, we weren’t traveling.  We could have our own merry Christmas, just the three of us. We would.  We’d do it.

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We tried.  In the photo above, we continue with the Christmas card images.  Mama reads ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, and I look giddy and act like I’ve never heard it before.  We’re both wearing new pink flannel PJs.  Our long hair is neatly brushed.  Beneath our fake smiles, you can see us grimly willing those visions of sugarplums to dance, dance, dance.
It didn’t work out. There were no sugarplums.  We missed our family.  We missed the big old house.  We missed our tradition.  It just didn’t seem like Christmas.  As a young child, I tended to carry an outsized burden of multiple anxieties, for no reason that could be explained.  That Christmas Eve, I was sad and inconsolable.  I couldn’t stop crying.  I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep.  Mama, loving and patient, sat with me, late into the night, holding my hand and offering assurance.  She had grown accustomed to this process, but usually it wasn’t quite so painful or long-lasting.

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Early the next morning, we packed up the gifts, the wrapped ones and those from Santa, bundled ourselves into the enormous blue Dodge station wagon, and headed to Kentucky.  The time would come, soon enough, for starting a new tradition.  That year, 1966, was simply not the time.

Deck the Dog

No theological implications here.  Just a dog too sleepy to mind being wrapped in synthetic greenery.  My daughter has always found it disappointing that Kiko refuses to cooperate and wear the typical doggie costume.  No devil horns for him at Halloween, no reindeer headband for the Christmas photo.  But this year, as we were hanging the stair garland, he lacked the energy to care, or perhaps to protest, when she decided to adorn him, as well. 

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Sleep in heavenly peace. 

Deck the Tree Stump

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This December, we hung a big wreath on the craggy maple stump in front of our house.  It seemed like an interesting, if unexpected, spot for a wreath.  And by decorating the tree, we could send a message to those who might see it as a business opportunity, as well as to those who think the stump is unsightly and wonder why we leave it standing.  The wreath says, We love this old tree trunk, and we’re letting nature take its course.

Then I thought a little more about it, and the pairing struck me as even more appropriate in its juxtaposition of life and death.  The stump is the opposite of the traditional evergreen Christmas tree.  Firs and spruces, retaining the appearance of vitality through the winter, get the privilege of being cut down, hauled into our homes, strung with lights and ornaments, and left to wither and die.  It’s tough work, being a symbol.  Our maple, though, would be in no such danger.  If intact, it would be gray-brown and leafless by now, like its neighbors in our yard.  But of course, it’s a stump, a snag, and already dead.  Yet it harbors vast, unseen colonies of creatures that go about the business of breaking down lifeless material.  It won’t be long before nature’s course is run.  The stump may not be here next year; its center is soft.  All the more reason to decorate it this year.

My husband and daughter hung the wreath one weekend afternoon, as I was napping, trying to get over a persistent cold.  When I trudged out to the road to see their handiwork, a new insight hit me.

I like to think that God works with us for good, despite ourselves, despite our selfish intentions and our vanity.  I initially wanted to decorate the tree because I thought it would look pretty, if a bit odd.  In truth, it was a way of declaring a certain pride in being different, in having the ability to see beauty where others see ugliness.

But once up, the wreath reminded me of a greater truth, of the essence of my Christian faith.  Out of death comes new, transformed life. How better to say it than in the words of John 3: 16:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

And then the snow settled beautifully on the wreath and the tree, on the green and the gray, on the quick and the dead, like a blessing from above.

A Veterans’ Day Prayer

May this Veterans’ Day be a reminder to thank, honor and remember the heroes who fought for our country, for our freedom, and for our strength.  Help us to  be grateful, every day, for all that they have done, for all that they have given.  May we find meaningful ways to show our appreciation.  Help us to treat our returning veterans with the respect, care and generosity they deserve, so that their wounds might heal.  May God bless these brave men and women and their families.  May God bless the U.S.A.

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Friendly Ghosts of Halloweens Past

My daughter is an ardent devotee of Halloween.  Evidently that first freezing trip to the pumpkin patch at ten months didn’t turn her against the holiday or its decorative trappings.  (See Looking Back on our Little Pumpkin, October 2012.)  During her preschool and elementary school years, her Halloween costume got plenty of mileage.  Around the start of summer, she began the costume discussion:  What would she be this year?  Soon the Halloween catalogues, sent to us by my mother, would come pouring in.  Once Mama and I had put the finishing touches on the outfit, usually in early October, she was in it.  As so many children do, she wore it repeatedly throughout the entire Halloween season, to parties and on many other occasions. These kids must know that dressing as a witch or black cat alleviates the tedium of mundane outings such as grocery shopping and dental visits.

After Halloweens One and Two as a Jack-o’- Lantern, our daughter followed up with Black Cat, Witch, Gypsy and Ghost Bride.  This year, she will be dressing as Daisy from The Great Gatsby, and hitting the neighborhood with a couple of friends, who, like her, plan to persist in trick-or-treating as long as they can.

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2002:  Everybody’s Crazy ’bout a Sharp-Dressed Cat

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2003: Good Witch-in-Training


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2004:  Gypsy Girl


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2005:  Ghost Bride