Email this page
Print this page
I’m packing up the holiday ornaments—where they’ll end up, I’m not quite sure. My son has bought his first home and will be spending his first Christmas there with his wife. They are decorator people—with a great eye, each of them, for color and design, original thinkers that manage to weave that originality into everything they do and still fit in, all trendy and traditional. Now that’s some trick.
Their neighbors will be glad these two fell in love with the sweet little house with the front porch and the lusciously natural backyard that makes my son think of Maine and “home.”
They’d owned their new house for 43 hours before they were married, and within three days of their return from the honeymoon, they had created a flower bed, dug in some yellow and rust-colored mums, and laid out the cornstalks and pumpkins; they’d painted the walls apple greens and sandstone, built custom shelves in the closets, and set out plump, fragrant candles. My son had drilled the holes for the magic shower unit his wife loved, and they were waiting for the refrigerator to be delivered.
They are nesters. I’m a nester, too. But as I’m cleaning out my nest—or specifically my storage area—I must be careful not to see my children as the repository of all things familial that I no longer want or need. How much of this passing on is burdensome?
I already gave the newlyweds Grandma Katie’s Belleek china tea set. That would be my Grandma Katie and my son’s Great-Grandma Katie, the one who came over from Ireland in a boat in—well, I don’t exactly know when. My guess is sometime before 1910. Once I read that receiving Belleek as a wedding gift is considered good luck, it seemed the only choice—even though delicate, almost translucent, bone-colored china with green shamrocks did not exactly sound like decorator heaven to me.
Since I’ve already moved once—from the 40-acre homestead of decades of living—I’ve eliminated a lot—even in the ornament category. But I’ve still held on to a fair share, including ones from my childhood that my mother passed down to me. I have the plastic snowmen, with their chipped white paint, each with, at most, a whisper of a mouth, perhaps half an eye. The sequin-pinned Styrofoam balls my mother made, the velvet ribbons a bit peaked, are indestructible. And I have never been able to get rid of the clusters of glass grapes and della robbia fruit. My mother went through a long della robbia phase.
But this holiday, the only ornaments that feel necessary—and probably always will—are the ones my kids made over the years: ones made of layers of thin everyday paper painted and glued together to build up some bulk, with holes poked through with a needle, and thread their hangers; and the popsicle-stick sleds, painted blue and red and orange, black and purple, some splattered with polka dots or streaked with stripes. But my favorites are the painted flour-and-water-dough ornaments they made for a few years just before they began to enter school and start their journeys out into the world. They are big and clunky, heavy things—certainly not delicate-branch material. Their colors are untraditional, and their subject matter quirky and subjective—including a to-this-day-still-bright-orange lump, a blue-and-black quasi-owl, and a dark-brown-faced Medusa with snaking sunshine-yellow hair. They are substantial, unique, resilient, and extraordinarily beautiful.
And this holiday, my children’s ornaments are nesting in a basket of straw on a wooden table in my living room. They are all the ornaments I need.
Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and visual artist. Her work is included in the recently published anthology The Other Side of Sorrow.
