An exercise from Old Friend From Far Away by Natalie Goldberg.
Tell me about a storage unit or someplace you stored things.
One thing I’ll always miss about home is the Christmas tree. More than the holiday itself, it was that living room conifer growing heavy with laughter and light in its stand that made the holidays my favorite time of year.
Granted, I was taken in by the rest, as well: the gradual build-up of gifts and cards and white packed snow and Christmas spirit; the shopping and spending and wrapping and bows; the holiday dinner with turkey and ham and wine and bread and too many people; the party on New Year’s Eve with the snap of pool cues, late-night cards, hide-and-seek in the dark, errant fireworks on the cold white lawn. The words everyone felt but nobody said.
But there was something about the tree that made it worthwhile, something in those heavy green branches, the spicy scent of pine or spruce, the lights, the glitz, the ornaments.
The attic. Crawling precariously over a skeleton of boards and pink fiberglass insulation, rustling through boxes, searching for the ones without pumpkins and witches and bats, Easter eggs, white rabbits, birthday greetings. And when we found the wreaths and garlands, half carrying, half dropping the awkward cardboard receptacles down the stairs. We worked in teams–my mother and brother and I, box from person to person to person, out of the attic, down the stairs. In the end we’d sit on the living room floor, the old warped and water-stained box of decorations on the fireplace hearth, pulling old ornaments from their compartments. From stone to cardboard to synthetics to skin.
Decorating was my favorite part, and there was lots to work with–the lights with their six different flash settings for entertainment, the furry gold snakes of garlands, the shiny rainbow of painted tin balls, the silver points. There were those whose origins I barely remembered: crocheted snowflakes, lace-covered candy canes, tiny wooden-framed cross-stitchings. There were candy wreaths, macaroni wreaths, baked gingerbread snowmen. There were balls swirled with paint and ribbon I’d made with a friend, little felt bears slightly stuffed and stitched with smiles and clothes and bells that moved, a clothespin nutcracker, a wooden sleigh. A white sand dollar hand-painted with glitter and tiny poinsettias, requiring the strongest branch on the tree, and my favorite–two baby seals on a patch of ice–that got center stage. The star glowed many different colors and sat on top, the presents seemed to radiate, everything was bright–even when the rest of life wasn’t.
When Christmas was over, we’d pile the gifts in our rooms and sweep up the needles and put each ornament back in its own little room in a warped cardboard house, our memories packed in the attic with scraps of glass and plastic and fabric in a fiberglass castle, a cold and quiet dark.
