A Christmas tree is a miscellany of childhoods, of geographic locations, of extended clan development and if seasonal whimsy. It is an archive of ornaments from school art projects and homespun crafts, some with fingerprints still intact, and glitter and hot glue dripping from popsicle sticks or paper strips on hand-glued ornaments. And it is a display of generations-worth of sacred objects and hand-me-downs. It is a re-enactment of rituals of retrieval, decoration, addition, and storage. It is vernacular Christmas ornaments and mementos of time and place. It is family archeology.
At my house, the tree goes up and out they come. The cookie-cutter ornaments made of salt dough and embedded sparkles, now decades into their eventual decay into crumbs. The half-life of salt dough may be eons. No one has ever seen the final decay. There are miniature Amish quilts, daughter Hilary’s second-grade Guatemalan “God’s Eyes.” daughter Ariel’s ceramic birds seem to be enduring quite well. There are school photos pasted on cardboard — son Spencer missing his front teeth; me, in high school, reclining on a motorcycle — assuming their place of honor on each new year’s tree. And lights, ring upon ring of lights. Sometimes, we’ve found, there’s even a stowaway from the forest where we harvested the tree: a bird’s nest secreted among the branches. Bonus ornament. The wild things participate in the miscellany. They all become heirlooms in the making.
Though some years angels and stars have adorned the treetop, this is the year of the mermaid, thanks to a creative friend who imagined repurposing plastic masks. Add sparkles and sequins and a little paint and voila. “Mermaids we have heard on high, Sweetly singing o’er the plains.” Who is to say a siren cannot top a Christmas tree, especially in our seacoast town?
T.S.Eliot would approve. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,” he wrote, then lamented, “I do not think they’ll sing to me.” Their unheard melodies do lure the eye upward. They preside over the living room, as the incoming tide of presents washes around the base of the tree. Can the three wise lobstermen, traveling from down east, be far behind? Naturally, we have a lobster trap ornament. It’s an epiphany for sure: Merangels!
Each year we cut a section from the tree base before securing it in the stand. We count the rings and inscribe a note as to who fetched it from the woods. Last year’s tree “cookie” had 11 rings and we imagined where we were when it began its journey towards the place of honor in our house and hearts this year. Annual rings, a chain of ornaments hanging off from tree to tree, Christmas to Christmas, child to teenager to adult, like the annual rings of family itself.
Here is the inscription on the tree cookie from 2004: “Hilary, Ariel, and Dad cut this down. December 14, 2004.” It dangles now from an upper branch on Tree 2018, and we can think about what it was doing 14 years ago. And next year, this year’s “cookie” of annual rings will be hanging up there beside it, as the tradition continues.
Todd R. Nelson is a writer in Penobscot. His daughter Ariel Nelson is an MFA candidate in Aberdeen, Scotland.