‘Spirit of Christmas Past‘ is a series of holiday memories that are keeping me warm this season.  As if I needed to be any warmer…

I sat on the couch listening to the gentle clunk of fragile boxes as Mema, my grandma, set them on the floor.  Papa, my grandpa, was sitting on the couch too—watching a football game on his big screen TV.

Watching football was tradition in their house so it was only right that the TV was so giant Mema and Papa had to clear out an entire living room storage space under the stairs to make room for it.  Most days nothing was bigger than that TV.  But, as I sat there, I had a hard time seeing it.   The 12′, flocked Madison Fir next to it was so enormous I thought Rudolph himself would pop out.

Mema looked like she was doing a dance as she carried the boxes of Christmas ornaments around the tree.  The tree was so big it was crippling if you got near it.  Plus, there was a battery-operated train that ran a loop around the bottom of it.

The boxes looked worn and tattered.  Inside—decades of ornaments sat waiting to get lost on that vast, white beauty of a tree.  I was ten-years-old and happy I got to be there to put the finishing touches on the year’s Christmas decorating.

Inside the boxes, I found different shapes of breakable gold, green, silver , and red ornaments.  Those seemed generic in comparison to the small, flat, circular ornaments cross-stitched with dancing bears, exercising bears, kissing bears, baseball-playing bears, and Sooner sweatshirt-wearing bears that my mother made in her free time to give as gifts each year.  Mom was a master of the needle and thread.

There were a couple silver ornaments with years engraved on them, a couple Santas, and the angel tree-topper who donned a white dress and carried a white light.  She didn’t fit on this tree.  She looked like she was falling over drunk.  She was made for average trees.

The last ornament in the box was a bell made from two small sections of a styrofoam egg carton.  The two small egg carton sections were glued together and outlined in glitter.  Yarn was attached for hanging.

Mema and Papa told me my Aunt Sandy had made the egg carton bell in elementary school.  I took my time putting it on the tree, making sure it wouldn’t fall apart.  It, more than any of the other dozens of ornaments, told a story of time—a concept I didn’t comprehend yet.

Papa kept his eye on the TV while he hung ornaments, but Mema made him put it on mute so we could play Christmas music.  The music seemed to match her entire being—her nail polish, her Christmas sweater, her gentleness with the tree.  I loved getting to see this side of my grandparents.  I loved getting to spend the night.  After we finished decorating, we baked cookies.  Papa and I sat around eating sweets the rest of the night.

A decade later, as I entered adulthood, I went to Mema and Papa’s for Christmas during my four-week University of Missouri break.  They had a huge flocked Madison Fir. I squinted at it.  Behind two branches layered in fake snow, I could see it, I could understand it now—a few specks of fading glitter on a crumbling egg carton bell that seemed to say “Nothing lasts forever”.  

Photo Credit: imelda on Flickr.com