Author: wvfurandroot
I love Christmas trees.
I’ve probably mentioned before that Christmas trees are my favorite part of the holidays.
For a time, I had a Christmas tree, albeit some were quite small, in every room in the house. A few years ago, I consolidated those into the Big Tree and the Little Tree. This year, I’m adding Doug’s big-ish tree to the guest bedroom – so three of them – Papa Tree, Mama Tree, and Baby Tree. Nevermind, the baby is a mere 7’.
I’ve loved Christmas trees for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, I was the first one to clamor for us to put up the tree. I was adamantly a real-tree person for decades until my carefully (and expensively) decorated tree fell over on me. As the ornament collection grew, so did their weight, and real trees just weren’t straight enough with heavy enough branches to handle it all. Enter artificial trees into my life. I’ve grown to like them, especially the pre-lit ones. They still take a lot of fiddling farting, but nothing like stringing lights.
The ornament collection is out of control. I select ornaments based on events in my life, or my child’s, or other significant events. I choose ornaments as memorials to folks gone, ornaments of pets past and present, ornaments as souvenirs from vacations, ornaments of pop culture that caught my attention or my son’s.
I believe my love of Christmas trees is genetic and Chef Boy ‘R Mine inherited the gene although it’s lying dormant right now. But when he was little, he was as entranced by the tree as I was. To protect him and the ornaments, I gave him a small, one-piece tree with battery-operated lights and a number of fabric ornaments that I procured from here and there.
He loved that tree from when I gave it to him at 18-months-old until he was 12 and felt manly men didn’t cotton to such things. He dragged that little tree around, decorated and undecorated it, augmented his ornaments with toys, dishtowels, potholders, Grandpa’s watch and anything else he could drape on it. I believe he was mimicking my penchant for ornaments never intended to be hung on a tree (like a McDonald’s Happy Meal Johnny Depp Stuffed Pirate.)
As Chef Boy ‘R Mine got older, his tree got bigger and his ornaments now icluded the stuff he made at school and collectible Star Trek ornaments I began buying him.
While developing his tree, “my” tree continued to grow. I bought Wizard of Oz ornaments by the dozen to celebrate my love and my son’s love for the movie. I bought Alice in Wonderland ornaments to signify the wonderful time he and I both had reading Alice aloud. A few years ago, my mother gave me the ornaments she made for the family tree – precious little figurines of ceramic angels and wisemen and shepherds.
When my son was about 9, I caught him and my manly-man brother lying on the floor engrossed in The Nutcracker Ballet – so engrossed they didn’t hear me ask them a question about dessert. The Nutcracker ornaments were procured.
All of these and more are now the ornaments that go on the “Little Tree” – a white extravaganza of whimsy designed to appeal to children and inner-children. I usually put this tree up first and some years it’s the only tree that goes up. It’s bright and colorful. It’s cheerful. It’s friendly. It reminds me of my son and the best years of my life.
I’m going all out with the Christmas decorations this year. The first year Doug saw my house decked out in full, he was charmed. I don’t, generally, these years put everything out, but this year it will be a memorial to him. There are ornaments on the little tree that I got because of some shared experiences with him (the lobster) and some he got (Santa in a coal truck.)
Everything on the tree has some significance even if I can’t remember what it is. I should write this stuff down before I forget it all. I hope that Chef Boy ‘R Mine comes to his senses by the time he inherits all this stuff – I hope to see it loved for generations to come.
The Big Tree is just as commemorative of my life, but more elegant and traditional. I’ve got the behemoth set up and arranged, but ornaments won’t go on until Tuesday. I don’t know that there will be time, but hopefully on Tuesday we can arrange the village that lives underneath it. Yes, I’ve arranged for help with the Big One – it’s overwhelming for one person.
Sunday Morning Gospel
In praise of the perfect purse.
The beginning of the school year through about February is the time of year I try to get a little more organized. The craze peaks with the New Year, generally. Year after year, January and February provoke me to look for ways to streamline and minimalize my life. While the grand plans of these two months seldom materialize in their entirety, I do make baby steps of progress.
This year I’m peaking early. At least I hope I’m peaking – I can’t sustain this frenzy for too much longer.
Often on this list of improvements is the acquisition of the Perfect Purse. Year after year, I try to downsize. As is my predilection, I take it too far. Even I should realize that I can’t go from a laptop briefbag to a clutch large enough for my driver’s license and a single Tic Tac.
I’ve been carrying HUGE purses since junior high. It started because it was fashionable. Some of the women amongst us will remember that time between girlhood and adulthood when we had to work to find stuff to put in our purses. We were too young for makeup, driver’s licenses and keys. Mace wasn’t invented yet. And we didn’t have cell phones, laptops, ipods, water bottles, or complicated calendar-agenda thingies. We didn’t have checkbooks, bills, tax receipts, legal pads or unpaid parking tickets.
What we had was a wallet bursting with classmate photos, a note from the cute boy in the second row, 45 cents for lunch, the sacred hair brush, the emergency dime, and a dusty sanitary napkin in the event the gym teacher wasn’t lying and we could expect the full bloom of womanhood any second.
By 9th grade, we did have the makeup and menstrual products, but that still wasn’t enough to get enough weight into the bottom of a tapestry carpetbag that was all the rage of the stylin’ and profilin’. Without sufficient weight, the thing looked stupid. So I tossed in a couple of books, some magazines, a transistor radio, spare batteries, another hairbrush, deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, a change of clothes, my school books, and poster paints.
As time went on, the truly useless stuff got evicted (poster paints) and true necessities (mousse, butane curling iron, Sony Walkman, leg warmers) got thrown in. Those things were evicted and replaced with diapers, pacifiers, thermometers, Tylenol, etc.
By the time I was 30, carrying a suitcase for a purse was so entrenched I didn’t think anything of it. I carried everything I might conceivably need with me at all times. (Until the TSA waged war on American airline passengers, I carried a corkscrew.)
Periodically, I think I might be able to rattle around town without quite so much and downsize to a small purse.
Trekking up and down the hill in the snow usually provokes the small purse thing. (Thank you, very much, I will not have to climb the hill this year due to the acquisition of the Subaru. Unless there is a big honking blizzard in which case, I will dance up the hill because BIG snow is fun.)
Last time, I thought I was being more realistic in the downsizing thing. I downsized to a fetching little Liz Claiborne number in a hot red with sizzling silver links. It looked big enough to hold more than a driver’s license and a Tic Tac.
It kind of worked. Everything fit, more or less except I had to take out everything to get to the one thing I wanted.
That got old.
I also had to downsize the key ring(s) for there even to be a prayer. I carry two rings of keys. One ring holds the car key, the house key, the post office key, the car remote, and the office key I use most. The second ring holds the other 7 office keys, keys I’ve had so long I don’t know what they are, and a huge circa 2005 4 gig flash drive I use to carry software between offices.
Somewhere along the way, I discovered that what works for me best is the open pit purse – a purse with no dividers , just a gaping maw like the carpetbag of old. They’re very hard to find. Very. This past summer I purchased a most-fetching white gaping maw hobo bag. Well, it was kind of a gaping maw, but the designer insisted on dividing the maw. It was better than most – far better. I was in purse heaven. I vowed to no longer flirt with a little purse.
When it came time to get out winter’s black purse, all the dividers and pockets and thises and thats made me crazy. I couldn’t find anything and kept having to dump it all out on a floor somewhere to find that one essential thing I needed.
So, the other day I was at Marshall’s when, no kidding, this purse leaped off a hook into my basket where it bounced off the side with some English spin and into my loving arms like a well-sunk 8-ball. I am in purse heaven. It’s huge, has the requisite SINGLE gaping maw, and was made by a bunch of Italians with a sense of how leather is supposed to perform. It cost more than I usually spend, but it is quite possibly the perfect purse. Some of you will scoff, saying there is no perfect purse. You may be right. You are probably right. But right now I think it’s perfect and that’s enough for today.
So what’s in your purse?
W. Va. Fur and Root 