Living in a home that dates back to the revolutionary war, society obligates me to hang wreaths on all the windows, tie ribbons and garlands to the flower boxes and arrange extension cords from the sparse supply of electrical outlets to put an electric candle in every window. I started with the four windows in the attic, carefully removing the duct tape from around the attic stairway door (past years experience with a bat infestation have taught me to seal the attic off every spring and NEVER to go up there until well after the first frost). To save time, and prevent unnecessary trips to the attic, I put new bulbs in the candles at the beginning of each Christmas season. After several hours of fluffing up artificial wreaths pulled from black hefty “storage bags”, hanging out windows in a crisp breeze to tie off the garland and ribbons and crawling under furniture to plug in all the lights, I stood on the lawn to admire the “country Christmas” look. It was then, in the approaching twilight, I noticed that I’d inadvertently bought “twinkling” light bulbs. Each room flashed in turn, it looked like a haunted house on “a dark and stormy night” in a low budget horror film. Neighbors already think the place is haunted, no sense adding grist to THAT mill. Off to CVS for more bulbs.
A fresh cut Christmas Tree is a must. Last year, I visited a specialty tree farm. I took a horse drawn wagon ride to the middle of “Chris Kringle” forest and was abandoned with a small, dull saw, in the middle of eighty acres of trees on the ice covered side of a mountain in a wind storm. This year, I thought I’d go for something less quaint and more efficient. First weekend in December, I pulled into a road side stand. I was immediately met by a large German woman with a strong accent. “Vat kind of tree do you vant?” she demanded. “Douglas.” I replied admiring a tree leaning against some saw horses. “Zat ist not Douglas, zat ist Frazier.”, she scolded. “I get them mixed up sometimes.” I replied. She looked at me like I was an idiot. “I think I need one about six or seven feet tall.” I said, moving down the line of trees. As luck would have it she was distracted by another customer. I stopped to admire a beautiful tree, perfectly shaped with no flaws or holes. I grabbed the trunk and held it upright to admire it. “ZAT IST NOT SEVEN FEET ZAT IST NINE FEET!” the woman shrieked from across the lot. I dropped the tree, sprinted back to the safety of my truck and burned rubber back onto the highway.
On my retreat back home I saw a handmade sign for a tree farm I’d never noticed before. “Its our first year.” The owner said as he offered me a cup of hot chocolate and some home baked cookies. “Get in my truck and I’ll drive you up the mountain. What kind of tree are you looking for?”. “Douglas.” I said definitively. When we arrived at the farthest end of the farm to look at the several acres of trees, I realized my mistake. “Frazier, sorry, I really meant Frazier.” “No problem.” he said cheerfully and drove me back down the mountain to within twenty feet of where I'd parked and proceeded to follow me down the aisles of trees carrying his chain saw and measuring stick. Pickin’s were slim. They were too thin, or too fat, or too short, or grotesquely misshapen. “I’ll find one!” I said cheerfully after rejecting about forty. I looked back to see this budding entrepreneur with the unmistakable expression of a man who was trapped into taking a woman shopping. I pointed at one that was the least objectionable and said, “This is it!” In less than a minute my tree was shaken baled and loaded into the truck.
I really didn’t think it was that bad until I got it home. It’s very wide and bushy on the bottom, with a few extra long branches that stick out to one side like a sort of bonsai type appendage, a third of the way up the tree, the branches disappear all together and then reappear as a thick, green ring. This is repeated once more and then, in the final three feet, the tree forms a single needleless spire. It’s the shape of an ornate perfume bottle.
There was only one uglier tree in all of my family history. Years ago, my brother, a seventeen year old youth, was charged with picking out the family Christmas Tree. I remember that it was monstrously large. When he proudly unfurled it, the tree was substantially wider at the top than it was at the bottom. It was three feet taller than the living room ceiling. It had a massive hole in the middle that sported a squirrel’s nest. My mother looked on in horror, but my Grandmother, the original Kleinschmidt took on the challenge. “ I just need a pair of loppers, hedge shears and an electric drill.” She cut branches from one place and screwed them into another and lopped and sheared until the tree was reassembled into Ol Tanenbaum.
I channeled dear Gammy and went to work. I threw one thousand lights at it (ten strings, one hundred bulbs each), used ornaments the size of footballs to fill in the holes, added about three hundred gold balls, a few red bows, a myriad of ornaments from Christmas’s past, created a “cage” of wire enforced gold ribbon to create the illusion of a Christmas tree shape and topped the whole thing off with a plastic angel with ostrich plumbs for wings. “If the tree has an imperfection,” advised my Grandmother, “Use something bright to draw the eye to a different spot.” I decorated the heck out of the dining room in an attempt to “draw the eye” over there….Kept the wine flowing generously at the Christmas party and no one noticed a thing.
It has been a wonderful season filled with friends and family, generosity, good cheer and many acts of kindness. And now it is New Year's.
The Village has put an all out press on ensuring good luck for 2012. First footers are carefully chosen (short, round, red haired women are considered bad luck and should not be offended if they are politely shooed away on New Year’s day in favor or tall, dark, handsome men carrying bread, salt and silver coins).
My friend Judy planned a “good luck” New Year’s day dinner consisting of all of the traditional foods and New Year’s customs from all the Villagers. We had the Pennsylvania Dutch pork and sauerkraut (pork is for moving forward with abundance, cabbage is for money), ham hocks, corn bread (for gold), and black eyed peas from Toni, our recent transplant from Texas, a dozen grapes each (one for every month of the year, Spanish tradition), coin cake, oriental salad with Soba noodles (which have to be slurped in one piece to ensure the luck isn’t broken), lentils and Italian sausage, Sausage and cabbage soup, Scandinavian Herring and rice pudding--- Short on creativity and time I made my “Lucky Hot Crab Dip”, it’s an ancient tradition from the early inhabitants of the Delmarva Peninsula to ensure a good harvest for the mighty Blue Claw crab hunters of the Big Assawoman bay area (sometimes I make stuff up). A great time was had by all.
Whatever is done on New Year’s day sets the tone for the rest of the year (one should NEVER do laundry, clean toilets or pay taxes on New Years Day if it can be at all avoided). Today I got up at five, mucked out the barn, groomed the Donkey, rode the horses, went to church, played the piano, did some writing, spent a wonderful evening laughing with friends, toasted our friendships and the new year with a sip of champagne and went to bed with a prayer that your year is filled with laughter, blessings, happiness and just the right amount of manure.
All my love,
Liz
