Christmas Tree Grandmas

 

Cedar Tree Grandma

Just a few days before Christmas, they went out to the woods and cut down their tree.  I was never with them, but know from Grandma’s stories that they took a crosscut saw with them, and looked for a cedar just a little taller than grandpa.  They dragged it back to the house, making sure they didn’t take any small animals or birds into the house along with the shaggy little cedar.  They set the tree into a big old store tin she had covered with freezer paper, red crepe paper streamers, and yellow construction paper circles, making it look like a drum.  Just one string of colored bulbs and a few light, fragile ornaments on the tree, as anything too heavy would fall to its doom onto their thin living room carpet.  We spent Christmas Eve with them and Aunt Joyce, who had come home to Indiana from St. Louis, Missouri; she told us of building airplanes for McDonnell-Douglas and eating exotic foods like tacos and Chinese chow mein.   Christmas Eve was the only time supper was served buffet-style at grandma’s; her counters were filled with ham, cornbread dressing, and bowls full of vegetables they had grown and canned – spiced beets and green beans and lime pickles all shining like jewels in cut-glass dishes.  Thick slices of the very best bread.  Fruitcake, Christmas pie, divinity and fudge.  

 I’m sure there were gifts for us all under the tree, but what I remember most are the stockings – real socks that grandpa had tacked onto the door between their bedroom and living room, as they had no fireplace.  Our stockings were filled the same way year after year: an orange, an apple, a handful of peanuts in the shell, foil-wrapped chocolates and a candy cane.  Joyce and mom would take turns playing the piano and we’d sing "Silent Night" and other carols until it was time to head home, dad warning us that we needed to be in our beds and fast asleep before Santa arrived.  Boots and mittens and wool coats were retrieved from the back room and quickly put on, as hugs and handshakes and "Merry Christmases" were shared on our way out the door.   

 

Aluminum Tree Grandma

The day before Christmas, they put the new silver tree together.  The two sections of the tall silver-painted trunk/pole were screwed together, then secured into the stand with 3 giant I-bolts; grandpa used the level to make sure it was straight.  Then each of the fluffy silver branches was slid out of their protective brown paper sleeves, the colored dot on the end of each branch checked and then inserted into the corresponding hole in the silver pole.  Layers and layers and layers of silver branches, ending with what was in itself a little silver tree, jammed into the hole drilled into the top of the pole.  Then grandma hung the new ornaments – all pink.  Some glass, some Styrofoam, covered with pink ribbon.  No lights, no star, but the magical color wheel was plugged in nearby, bathing the tree in red, then green, then yellow, then blue.  The new electric tree stand tinkled “Silent Night” as it turned the shiny tree round and round.   

At Christmas lunch, there was  fried chicken and fried biscuits with apple butter from my uncle’s restaurant, marinated shrimp and ribbon Jello salad, ice cream snowballs and sugar cookies decorated with all the colors of icing.   So many cousins, so many presents, so much crumpled paper and ribbon and boxes.  I complained because we always left the raucous, joyous gathering first - too early - but there were cows to milk and calves to feed back home.

 

Now I am the grandma.  I am a Frasier Fir grandma, but I have a silver tree and a box full of pink ornaments in the basement.  There’s a cedar tree in our backyard, and I cut branches and tie them to the staircase and drape them onto the tops of our cabinets.   When everyone comes for Christmas lunch, there is ham and spiced beets and ribbon Jello salad and sometimes shrimp cocktail.  Cookies and some sort of spectacular dessert.  Stockings and crumpled paper.  There are games, boxed wine and so much talk and laughter.  I don’t want them to leave, but will confess that it is a little relief when the house transforms from a rowdy mess back to a quiet mess.

My grandmas did it all without Pinterest.  Without WalMart or Target. Without Amazon prime delivery.  Without a microwave oven or Zip-Lock bags. Without cell phone texting to confirm sweater sizes or decide who is bringing what to dinner.

But I’m sure their Christmases weren't without worry – worry about sweater sizes and who is bringing what to dinner.  Worry about the world - they were the grandmas of the 1960's and 70's, living in a world of war, of counterculture, of mini skirts and rock and roll - a world that was changing faster than they ever could have imagined.  And their families changed - marriages, babies, traumas, sicknesses and death.   

I'm a grandma of the 2020's.  The world is changing fast and I worry about the kids who gather around our table - what does the future hold for them?  They will have such great joys - marriages, babies, accomplishments -  and I hope we have prepared them to endure the traumas which will surely come.  I try to stay positive and not worry - I can still hear grandma (cedar tree) telling me that there are 27 scriptural passages in the Bible which tell us not to worry.  

But I still do.  

And despite the worry, the world spins and Christmas comes.

It will come in a few weeks, and it will come again in 2025, whatever 2025 brings.

It will come with stockings and cookies and joy.  

With the cedar and the aluminum.

Peace. 

A Nice Hot Beverage

 When he brings me coffee in the morning, it’s good old-fashioned brewed coffee, made with 3 coffee scoops of Maxwell House or Folgers or Dunkin Donuts and the water from our well, passed through the filter to remove the iron and sulfur and God only knows what else.  He fills my morning cup just halfway, just the way I like it, so the coffee stays warm, with just enough cream to make it delightful but not cool.  If I’m writing or knitting or reading, he’ll refill my cup.  Always.

 When he makes coffee after we have lunch, we split a French press, maybe made with fancy coffee purchased at one of the new shops in town and the water from our well, filtered from God only knows.  He uses the wacky wibble-wobble-double nipple method as we saw Mrs. Marlowe demonstrate on an episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries – one of a long line of BBC shows we started watching during Covid - and the coffee is always perfect.  Just one cup apiece, but really, that’s enough for an afternoon, isn’t it?

 If he makes coffee after supper, it’s from the Keurig, and it’s decaf for me, regular for him, made with a little white pod that my green little heart would love to recycle, but is almost impossible.  Yes, we tried those compostable pods John Green sells, but they exploded in the coffee maker, pouring both grounds and weak coffee water into our cups.  And in a very If you give a Mouse a Cookie way, the grounds remind us of my grandma, whose coffee from the white and blue Pyrex percolator always included a healthy teaspoon of grounds, and we laugh at how very grandma that was and how I still love chewing on a few grounds. 

 If it’s a holiday or a birthday, he makes pot after pot, pouring just a half a cup for everyone to start with their birthday cake or sugar cream pie.  If you’re still drinking coffee after an hour or so, you get a full cup, but he reminds me, if it’s after 3:00, I probably want to switch to decaf.  We sit around the table like a Norman Rockwell family, telling stories, playing games, calming quarrels between the little girls and laughing. 

 If it’s Tuesday, he hands me my coffee in a Life is Good travel cup.

 If it’s a Sunday church morning, he hands me a cup of hot tea -- Yorkshire Gold, no sugar or cream or honey.

 If it’s Christmas, it’s hot chocolate made with our secret formula cocoa mix (not such a secret – just add a box of chocolate pudding mix), sometimes stirred into a cup of coffee.

It’s November, and maybe we should call it our own Hot Beverage month.   It’s a big month.  Our anniversary, a big birthday for one of us, Thanksgiving.  Lots of cool weather, lots of gathering together. 

This November, he brings me my coffee in the quiet.  I am sad over a disappointing and frightening election.  And today, it’s a trip to the doctor for a biopsy result.  Whatever the outcome, we will be ok.  He knows the percentages and they are good.  He knows the treatments, and they are do-able.  He knows we have each other, and we always will welcome each new day with a warm beverage – we will always have coffee. 

 And I will bring it to him.

Peace

Blue Sweater

 

She wore her blue cardigan almost every day.  She had ordered the blue yarn in the summer of 2024, the night Kamala accepted the nomination for President.  It arrived a few days later, and she opened the box quickly but carefully, and happily sighed as she squished the blue merino sport yarn in her hands.  The manufacturer had named this particular blue “denim”, but she thought it was so much more vibrant, so much more intense than her old jeans or her dad’s overalls.  It was a blue hard to describe, though – maybe the blue of Lake Superior?  The blue you see intermixed with the purple mountain majesty of the Rockies?  Maybe blueberries?  For sure, she saw in the squishy blue yarn the hope all knitters have upon starting a new pattern, a new project, a new era.  She had also ordered three skeins of thin blue mohair (very demure, very feminine) to hold with the merino, as was popular with knitters that year.  She pulled her #5 needles out of her knitting bag and cast on a swatch; it was a joy to watch as the two yarns melded into a fluffy blue square.

She took her sweater project everywhere with her that fall, knitting not only at home, but at football games, waiting rooms, in the car as she waited for trains to pass and of course, to her knitting group at her favorite little coffee shop downtown.  First the collar appeared, then the raglan increases at the shoulders and then the body of the sweater took shape.  On October 1, Jimmy Carter’s 100^th birthday, after finishing the ribbing at the waist of the sweater, she went back and picked up the stitches for the right sleeve, then a few days later, the stitches for the left sleeve.  She dampened it, then carefully blocked the sweater on thick towels on her bed, shaping it so that it appeared more like a garment than a blue octopus.  Then she sewed on the pearl buttons, put on the sweater and went out to vote.  Early. She wore the sweater on November 5^th in anticipation, and on November 6^th in celebration and almost every day since in remembrance.

She wore it through the turbulence, then through the complex time of coming back  together, then in the time of peace that came from heartfelt –  sometimes angry – discussions and truth.  She patched one of the elbows carefully with some soft red wool cut like a heart.  She replaced buttons, scolding herself for not taking more time to sew them on correctly the first time, but then reminding herself how excited she had been to finally have it completed.  She wore it to vote again in 2026, then 28, 30 and 32; she liked the nice round numbers of election years.  She wore her blue sweater and sometimes voted for Republicans, if she believed that the Republican woman would be best for local schools, her congressional district or the US Senate, which once again worked across the aisle – so much more “all of us” than the “us vs. them”.

She wrote in her will that she would like to be buried in that first blue sweater (over her pajamas)
and would like her daughters and granddaughters to wear their blue sweaters to her funeral; she had knit a blue sweater with pearl button for each of them.  She had knit blue sweaters for friends, for charity and even one for Gwen Walz, a woman who knew the power of a good cardigan in a chilly room.

She became known in town as the old lady in the blue cardigan, and that was ok with her.  

She was warm.  She was comfortable.  She was full of joy.

Peace.

NaPoWriMo - My one and Only Poem for 2024, Inspired by a Recent Event and A bit of Trauma

 

As he ran away from my house

After he tried to open the locked basement door

After I heard a racket and went out on the deck to investigate, thinking the kerfuffle was from curious racoons stealing from full bird feeders

After scolding myself once more for not going to Olive’s soccer game

After sitting down with the most complex knitting pattern I’ve ever attempted and falling deep into concentrated counting of the scattered arrays of purple purls and white knits,

I yelled at him.

Hey, what are you doing? I yelled as he sprinted from underneath the deck toward the creek.

Do you need something? I yelled as he changed direction and sprinted across the field toward my sisters’ houses.

I whispered to myself.  Mostly curse words.

What in the hell? I whispered as I bolted for my car.

Son of a bitch. I whispered as I scanned the field and road for sight of him.

(This, incidentally, is the first and last curse I ever heard from my mother, intensely whispered as another car ran a light and almost plowed into our children-filled, fake-wood-covered-panel station wagon.)

What in the actual fuck? I whispered to myself as my brave sister and I scanned around her house and she checked for him in her garage and locked the door behind her.

I spoke calmly

As I called the sheriff’s office, my second sister, my nephew

As I hugged Harry, and told him it was not his fault, as he was in the front yard and the intruder came from the back yard, from the fields surrounding us, through the creek, and that he was still the goodest boy.  Harry, not the intruder, but you knew that, didn’t you?

I told myself

That this was an isolated incident

That this man didn’t come looking for me

That he was probably looking for something to steal

That he would have found nothing of value to him in our basement, it being filled with boxes of holiday decorations and old furniture someone might need someday and toys I just can’t part with and canning jars

That if the door had been unlocked and he was angry at not finding anything worthy of stealing he would have come upstairs and Harry would not have stopped him with his goofy happy face and furious bark because he was in the front yard and still the bestest boy and

Worst case scenario.

I whisper to myself

And list the things he did steal

 – the peace I cherish in this house that no burning candle, or burning sage or burning stick of palo santo has yet to return

- the comfort of sitting on the couch under a quilt with a book or a good BBC crime drama or a piece of knitting without constantly glancing right, toward the French doors, expecting someone I’ve never seen before to be there,  pulling pushing pulling pushing on the door lever

- the tranquility of waking up in the middle of the night in this warm and quiet and dark house, and going back to sleep surrounded by love and too many pillows on the bed

– the pluck I’ve developed through all the years of Clay’s travels, to be able to stay by myself, do for and by myself

– the joy of open doors, open windows, open garage, letting in the spring and the warmth and the robins who are determined to build their nest in the garage.

And I know

if he had asked, I would have given him a sandwich or a twenty or a box of Christmas decorations. 

Peace