On Sunday, Rob and I put up our Christmas tree! As we worked, we listened to Christmas music (and the thunder and rain) and chatted about our childhood Christmas memories. “We’d always put up our tree on a Friday night,” I said. “Back then, a …
On Sunday we put up our Christmas tree! Rob came home with the tree that afternoon. It was a nice, tall, straight tree with a perfect pyramid shape, but when we got it in the stand we noticed that its bottom branches had lost most …
I know it’s after Christmas now, but I just have to pay tribute to my mom’s Christmas spirit. Even at 81 years old, she can still create Christmas magic like nobody else.
At Christmastime (and, really, all the time) there’s a wonderful feeling at Mom’s house of creative bounty. The cozy house seems like Santa’s workshop, like a magical factory churning out treats, toys, ornaments, and other seasonal delights. This year, for much of December, the dining room table was covered with Christmas gifts that Mom was making for my sister Bunny’s second-grade students. Mountains of homemade candy and cookies and cute little prizes (sparkly pencils, cupcake-shaped erasers, etc. ) surrounded a centerpiece of luscious peppermint-striped amaryllis. Mom had even made each child their own red velvet stocking with their name spelled out in silver glitter.
Every year Mom’s living room is bursting with Christmas. The room will be crowded with presents (so many that you can barely squeeze in the door!), and there are always several Christmas trees and a Christmas village. Christmas candles glow and flicker, and every chair is taken up by a jolly extended family of puffy snowman dolls, the gents wearing vests and the ladies wearing shawls.
“There’s so much to see in here,” I always say when I stand in her living room. “It’s just awesome. There are so many details.”
Rob calls it “a Christmas explosion.”
Mom’s main Christmas tree is always loaded with candy-colored lights, gold garland, and the funniest, cutest, prettiest ornaments, most of them handmade. Lace angels hover here and there, and a little felt mouse sleeps in a walnut-shell cradle.
Big glittery silk flowers bloom all over the tree, from top to bottom–poinsettias, lilies, roses, sunflowers, and more.
“I like to use the flowers to fill in the holes,” Mom will chuckle.
Our presents are all wrapped in Mom’s special way. Mom is the world’s best present-wrapper! The wrapping is sparkly and lush, over the top, with lavish bows–and little extra presents attached to the bows for even more bling. (Mom calls the little extra presents “toppers.”)
Mom’s Christmas decorating is so exuberant, so super-duper, that it makes my own decorating seem, by contrast, cautious, even stingy. Mom’s decorating is a perfect reflection of her heart. There’s so much joy and love apparent in it, such generosity and freedom, lack of concern for rules, such buoyancy, such a sense of fun. Mom has Easter chicks and bunnies mixed in with the Christmas stuff. One bunny even holds a tray with a Christmas-tree-shaped candle on it. Mom doesn’t care. She never excludes. She welcomes everybody to participate in her Christmas celebration, even the Easter Bunny.
Mom doesn’t put lights outside, but her yard always seems decorated for Christmas because it’s so full of flowers and fruits. Oh, the bounty! You should see it. Every nook and cranny is festooned with blossoms and fallen petals, and lemons, grapefruit, and satsumas hang from the citrus trees like shining Christmas balls.
If you ever visit Mom’s house, you will go home with a present–not just at Christmastime but any time, even in July, even in January. A few weeks ago, I went over there on a random Sunday and she said, “Since you have so many fireplaces, I was wondering if you might like some more Christmas stockings!”
(For years Mom has been making special embellished stockings covered with sequins and beads and fancy stitching, each one an elaborate project that takes weeks to finish.)
“Sure,”
I said. “If you’re sure you don’t want them.”
“I don’t,” Mom insisted. “They’re just sittin’ here!”
Then she led me into her bedroom and opened a storage bin filled to the brim with fancy sequined, beaded stockings—big stacks of them. I mean, there had to be 50 or more. I chose eight more stockings, promising to take very good care of them.
“I
can’t believe you made all of these!” I said.
“Well,” Mom laughed, “I have to have something to do while I’m watching Perry Mason in the morning!”
This weekend, I made another felt Christmas ornament—a Christmas queen! Before I got started this time, I did a little research in preparation—I read up on the basics of embroidery. I tried hard to be neat, but, despite my best efforts, things went awry and …
On Friday night, I started making a new Christmas ornament–a snow kitten! I had so much fun. Rob was playing a show with his band, so the cats and I were on our own. As soon as I got home from work, I changed into …
Last weekend went so smoothly it seemed sort of enchanted. Rob and I got so much done. And yet somehow, magically, we still found time to baby the cats and savor our homegrown citrus and have lots of dorky domestic fun.
I’ll tell you about our accomplishments first. We finally, finally finished mulching the gigantic bed on the south side of the front yard. We’ve been trying to get this project done for literally a couple of years. In order to kill the grass and weeds, we put down layers of newspaper then covered them with wood mulch. We went through boxes and boxes of newspaper and used up our whole pile of mulch. We got the whole bed done, so now, at last, it’s pretty much ready for planting. I’m planning on filling it with native sumac, palmettos, woodland sunflowers, and rosinweed, and I’m already picturing how it will be someday—wild and shaggy, full of hiding places for birds and lizards and other small creatures.
Here’s another project we completed: We finally found the right spots for all our garden furniture. You see, for years I’ve been collecting pieces of old cast-iron garden furniture, pieces I find at various junk stores. They’re usually quite a mess when I bring them home—rusty, or covered in thick, bumpy, peeling layers of paint. So Rob and I scrape them down with our metal brushes, and we sand them, which is very boring. (As we’re sanding, I might talk about how I’m planning to take my little cat Carl to see The Nutcracker. I might mention that Carl will be wearing a tweed cap and his new saddle shoes to the performance. I try to make sanding extra painful for Rob.) After sanding, we usually apply some Rust-Oleum Rusty Metal Primer, and then we paint. We paint every piece a glossy, tidy, elegant black.
Anyway, on Saturday we finally found a home for some of the latest pieces, two tiny chairs with a pattern of grapes and grape leaves, and a tiny matching table. I don’t know why antique garden furniture is so small, but it is. Rob and I look like giants if we ever actually use it; it’s a much better size for cats and teddy bears. But back to the point: We found a perfect spot for the tiny chairs and tiny table. Well, actually we created it. We made a little “patio” of river pebbles for them to sit on right next to our vegetable garden. First we pulled out a big, messy bed of mint (the soil was luscious black and earthworm-riddled). Then we found some old bricks in the woods (a brick mine!) and we used those to make an edge. Next we rode up to Walmart and bought 20 bags of river pebbles and spread them, and in the end we had a pebble path leading from the back steps to our new pebble patio and on past the vegetable garden to the Meiwa kumquat tree.
We arranged the furniture and tidied up the surrounding beds. Then I picked a bouquet of camellias for the table. The camellias were the crowning touch, I thought–even though I’d run out of proper vases and had to stick them in a weird old pickle jar. The flowers were dark, tempting pink and white and made me think of big scoops of cherry swirl ice cream.
The new pebbly place by the vegetable garden
Now a little bit about the purely fun stuff we did: We picked our first Roble orange and found it to be almost unbelievably delicious. So intense. There’s a passage in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead that I particularly love, and tasting the Roble orange made me think about it again. In it, an elderly preacher is trying to imagine what heaven might be like. He says, “Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I’d multiply by 10 or 12 if I had the energy. But two is much more than sufficient for my purposes.” Well, if the grass is two times as green in heaven, and the sky is twice as blue, then the Roble orange is a little taste–a little preview–of what’s to come, because it’s twice as good, twice as flavorful as most ordinary, earthly oranges.
A citrus sampler platter: Nagami and Meiwa kumquats, a satsuma, a Roble orange, a Cara Cara orange, a Rangpur lime, and a Meyer lemon
The cats played a large role in the weekend, I’m glad to say. On Saturday afternoon, for example, we sat on the warm driveway and showered Maggie with catnip and compliments:
“Oh, isn’t Maggie pretty with all her silver stripes?” I said. “Her stripes make her look like a little slice of layer cake.”
“She’s so soft,” Rob said, stroking her.
“She’s got bunny fur.”
“And she keeps it so clean.”
“She’s nice and plump too. Pleasantly plump. I’ve taken to calling her ‘Maggie Ball’ lately.”
“She is rather round,” Rob said.
“It’s because she’s a hog,” I said fondly. “She always steals the whole serving of Fancy Feast and runs away with it. She steals from her very own sons.”
I don’t have a picture of Maggie (she’s scared of my camera), but I do have this shot of hammy little Frankie sitting on Rob’s knee.
Just thought I’d show you some of my wacky little “treasures.”
An old stirrup cup. Most of my knickknacks have an animal theme.
I had a hard time concentrating at work this week—simply because I was feeling too Christmassy. I wanted to string popcorn and listen to “Last Christmas” by Wham, not sit at my computer. So anyway, I was happy when it was finally Saturday and I could do a little Christmas baking.
Sometimes I bake things to help me remember, to transport me to another place in time. This weekend I was thinking about our family’s rare trips to Granny’s house in Winston-Salem when I was little, so I made some old-fashioned Moravian pumpkin muffins …
Yesterday Kris had a Christmas cookie-baking party and I made vegan coconut macaroons using this recipe. They turned out pretty good!
We had so much fun at the party. We baked cookies and drank hot cider and made Christmas ornaments with lots of glitter. We got glitter all over the house. (Frosting too.) The only thing we ate the whole day was cookies, so we were all moaning and totally sick. After dark, we played cops and robbers with Jake, and it was so warm it felt like spring though the neighborhood sparkled with Christmas lights.
I’m reprinting the macaroon recipe below with my little changes:
Vegan Coconut Macaroons
Ingredients:
3 cups sweetened shredded coconut
1/2 cup powdered sugar
3/4 cup coconut milk
2 Tbls Ener-G egg replacer
2 tsp almond extract
Directions:
Mix the coconut and powdered sugar in a large bowl. Whip the egg replacer in the coconut milk and add to the coconut/sugar mixture, blending well. Mix in the almond extract. Make sure everything is well blended. Roll the “dough” into small balls and place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake at 325 degrees for 20 minutes.