Packing away Christmas for the year
I felt like a jewel thief. Only some weird holiday version of one, who sidles up to a warm and cracking fire as the sleepy home’s inhabitants are nodding off. I am the graceless kind, trying to be silent as I pocket a sparkly bauble from old Tannenbaum’s branches. I manage to knock over a tower of empty boxes instead, falling into the tree and seizing a hunk of a plaster that turns out to be a glittery thumbprint made to look like a reindeer. No one stirs. Luckily I am invisible. Before anyone is the wiser, I have wrapped the ornament in a scrap of ancient tissue paper and stowed it in a box next to a blanket stitched letter “S.”
A whole family of felted and stuffed initials are scattered throughout this trove.
But for all my stealthiness, I have no actual superpower. In fact, I am reasonably sure that the chore itself is what renders me so unapparent.
If there is a woman on earth who has managed to delegate the work involved in the breaking down of Christmas, I have yet to make her acquaintance.
It’s like any other household chore except that the decorative conifer propped up in a festive plant stand, bedazzled with a slew of decorative knickknacks, and currently shedding its needles all over my living room floor, doesn’t have any natural enemies beside yor’ friendly neighborhood volunteer firefighter (who would also like to remind you to unplug the toaster oven when not in use).
The tree could very well stand there until summer, at which point it would be just a few handfuls of broken glass ornaments clinging to a nubbly pine skeleton with piles of curled up brown needles all over the floor.
I miss my mother as I glance at the green fringed tablecloth that has served as our tree skirt for all of these years, appallingly apparent that its true purpose is as a de facto towel to soak up the spillage from hap-hazard feedings.
I think about her as I make my way around the tree, taking things off in groupings: first the flat things, and then the fluffy things, followed by the breakable things in waves of similar size.
It’s a method that makes it seem as if I have a three-dimensional map of their official positions in the storage containers permanently etched into my brain. When in truth, I usually wing it.
Boxes upon boxes of keepsakes that never house the same things twice.
In one of these boxes is another box, filled with perfectly wrapped orbs that haven’t been touched by human hands in at least three Christmases. If I pick one up, I can tell which I am holding from memory just by feeling its shape and weight.
The pink, sequined diamond - that was one of my favorites. The little elf man dancing in the hollow of a pin cushion egg, a very close second.
I barely remember my mother making these ornaments. She wasn’t the crafty sort, but she turned out so many of these intricate gems one year that the tip of her index finger bore a perfect divot where the pins pushed inward.
She lamented how she sold all the best ones the ones made from our dresses and that had the most meaning to her - at one of the church craft fairs. With the same breath she would chide herself for getting so attached to “things.”
These same “things” that have attached to me, and which, still in their wrappings, I haven’t had the bravery to hang on my tree lest any one of them meets its demise as a dog’s chew toy.
“Maybe next year,” I think as I tuck that box away and slowly add the others.
I can almost hear my mother’s laughter as my kids make one last lap of the kitchen - grabbing a last handful of cereal for their nightly hibernation - when they finally notice my work in the next room.
“Hey! You undressed the tree.”
Siobhan Connally is a writer and photographer living in the Hudson Valley. Her column about family life appears weekly in print and online.