Industrial arts

Thu, 01/15/2015 - 10:00

Eva Murray

Be warned, ye regulars, as I am about to get very sappy.

On the sixth day of January I took our Christmas tree down. My husband and I are both quite capable of leaving the tree up for a ridiculously long time, both of us rather in love with the aesthetics of the thing, and neither of us overly eager to deal with the chore, or to end the festivities, or to confront the closet under the stairs, from which chilly drafts and musty dirt-basement smells seep. Access to this hidden space means moving the furniture and taking great care not to accidentally bump the switch to the kerosene pump, a mistake easily enough made when handling boxes a fraction of an inch smaller than the opening through which they must fit. There is a stern message taped up in the dimness, scribbled in red magic marker: “Watch the pump switch!” We only risk it twice a year: to get out the ornaments and to store them away.

We always have and will only have a real tree, a soft, fragrant balsam fir freshly cut by us, either on our property or with permission—not stolen or snuck or swiped even if nobody would care—and hauled home with great satisfaction, ideally with at least one of the children, who are no longer children and whose employers do not easily grant them time for such important expeditions.

A real tree has always meant a lot to me. When I lived in The City years ago, my grandmother in South Thomaston would send us a small tree every December, cut from the woods near her home on Waterman’s Beach Road. She’d stuff it into a muffler box and we’d get a slip in the mail notifying us that we had a parcel to collect at the post office. When I was a student at UMO I broke the rules mightily by bringing live greenery inside, but I never could hack that fake stuff. This year, by some stroke of exceptional luck, we found a gorgeous tree, a perfect specimen considering the realities of wild trees, even just the right size so nothing was wasted, and I cannot remember ever having a finer Christmas tree. This week we were in no hurry to take it down.

That’s why Twelfth Night: I figured if I didn’t make a bit of an event out of this, I’d be missing my big chance to get the job done painlessly. The tree was still in fine condition—likely in better shape after almost three weeks service than those poor old evergreens trucked into cities and sold out of parking lots are their first day up—but, it was time. I threw a small batch of gingersnaps into the oven to make the house smell good, played-- just once more--my favorite hammer dulcimer Christmas CD to make the house sound good, made up a cup of hot chocolate with just a small splash of the Kraken, and turned to the task at hand.

In this family Christmas is nearly a month long. We wince just a little at the pressured artificiality when advertisers refer blandly to “the holidays” but it is truly a bunch of holidays for us, because we stretch it out, and improvise, and take it slowly, and borrow anything that looks like a good feed or a happy excuse for candles and music. Much of our extended celebration and moveable feast is for logistical reasons, between the inevitable confounding of travel across Penobscot Bay, the requirements of various jobs (such as not to leave without a substitute in place when you run a power station, or to show up at all hours when you work for L.L. Bean in December,) and weather, always the weather, the islander’s constant battle. But we also help ourselves to any December holidays we like, regardless of ancestry-- maybe Saint Lucia Day, maybe Hanukkah, the winter solstice for sure, Boxing Day sometimes, Orthodox Christmas might be a good excuse for more baklava—and Twelfth Night, Epiphany, the wind-up of the whole thing. Why not let it smell like ginger and sound like bells around here just one more time before we pack it all away?

Epiphany, or the Feast of the Three Kings, or the 12^th Day of Christmas, is celebrated for real and in earnest in some parts of the world, with goodies and presents and more specialties from the kitchen. I have heard that George Washington made merry on this day more so than on the 25^th of December, which in those days was more for church than for feasting. Recall that much of what we consider normal Christmas behavior in this country came from Germany and thereabouts, brought to England by Prince Albert among others, proving that the adopting of new revelries from other countries around this time of year is an entirely legitimate behavior.

Taking down the tree encourages me to get a smidge too sentimental. Maybe it’s the low light, or the rum, or finally seeing a bit of snow again, but I let myself indulge in a fairly mushy counting-of-the-blessings here.

There are the kids’ ornaments, as each year they have both been given at least one new trinket, so there are things like Emily’s hockey skates from high school and Eric’s airplane from toddler days. There is that glass bell with “1989” in gold paint, a small treasure which my mother found to top our wedding that year (which cake she baked, and which was chocolate, and very large. I don’t know anybody else who has some actual use for their wedding cake topper, but ours gets hung on the Christmas tree because that is what it was made for. That was genius.)

There are Paul’s owls, and there is a monarch butterfly, and there is a railway conductor. People give us lighthouses and boats, because we live—here; for some reason somebody also gave us flying pigs. There are Emily’s souvenir ornaments from the Magic of Christmas at the Portland Symphony Orchestra, and there are Paul’s childhood ornaments from the 1950’s, some of them strange plastic creations from some Portland dime store. There are the cheap but carefully chosen glass balls that I bought at LaVerdiere’s in the early 1980s, when I lived alone and wanted to decorate my own place for Christmas (it was an odd feeling, I remember, buying new Christmas balls. Growing up, Christmas tree ornaments were simply things that had always been, and came from time before me. I felt it an honorable responsibility, picking out new ones, even if just from a Rockland drug store.) There is a clothespin reindeer some 1st-grader made for me when I student-taught at Rockport Elementary in 1985. There is a pickle. The goofiest of the lot is an electrical box knockout which sort of takes the form of a star, a bit of junk somebody hung up as a gag one year a long time ago, but which has become a traditional treasure, an inside joke perhaps-- or maybe not a joke, maybe a respectful nod to the electricians of Christmas. Of course, there is the stuff the kids made aboard the Sunbeam years back, starfish Santas and other broken bits with glitter and paste.

Not every ornament goes up every year. At this point our children, now 22 and 24, are in the mood for a bit less kitsch, so not every starfish Santa or tempera-painted sand dollar, maybe no flying pig, and maybe not much from their dad’s box of retro ‘50’s plastic has to be hung. It’s still fun to catch a peek at such things even if they stay in the box.

As I prepare to send this to the editors, we get word here on Matinicus that the Sunbeam has arrived in the harbor. We’ll go down and visit later, maybe eat a few cookies. There were no school-age children on this island to make ornaments aboard the Sunbeam this year. I suppose, then, getting a tad soft about how my children did those things once is not an unacceptable sentiment.

Eva Murray lives on Matinicus.