Trees and Trims

Our Christmas house has more than one tree to trim.  We have artificial trees these days, but the decorations that dress them have been on many trees in many different places.  After the spare snowflake and string ball trimmed tree of our 1964 Christmas, Joe and I added an ornament or two or three every year.  So that our sons would have their own Christmas ornaments when they left to begin their own traditions and families, we let them choose an ornament for their own each year which was stored in a box.  I love visiting their homes and seeing a few of those childhood choices on their trees this time of year.  This tree is in my kitchen.  It celebrates family and the cooking we enjoy together, and is trimmed with cookie cutters I used when I was a little girl, cookie recipes handwritten  by grandmothers and friends, and little gingerbread boys and girls. The gingerbread family is over 35 years old, so of course is not real gingerbread.  When my sons were all in the same elementary school, one year we made baker's clay ornaments colored with instant coffee for all their teachers plus some for our own tree.  They come back out to dance on our tree and remind us of many happy Christmas times together in our kitchen.

My granddaughters are a delight all year 'round, but Christmas brings more fun than ever.  We enjoy making this tea tray with a tiny tree, teacups and teapots. We add a mix of pretty tea bags and Joe's mother's small spoon collection plus the book A Cup of Christmas Tea.

Snowflakes

Cutting paper snowflakes can make young children into magicians and grandmas into little girls again.  There is mystery involved in the folding, choosing just the right place to cut, and carefully trimming little triangles and curves and slashes.  But there is wonder in the unfolding!  Much like the real ones, no two snowflakes turn out exactly the same.  I have never lost that sense of expectation and trying to imagine how this one is going to turn out.

Forty-nine years ago Joe and I celebrated our first Christmas as a married couple.  That December found us far from our Texas family and friends, in Corvallis, Oregon.  The original plan for Joe to enter graduate school there had been delayed.  In the meantime, he did any odd job available, including painting houses.  I worked as a nurse in a busy pediatric practice within walking distance of our apartment.  One of our doctors had a farm outside of town where we were invited to come cut a Christmas tree. We tramped around the hillside brushing away blackberry vines to find a perfect small Grant pine.  Its symmetrical, graceful branches had wide spaces that were perfect for decorating.  But we were beginning our home and our traditions.  We had no old familiar ornaments to unbox and remember.  We also had no extra money in the budget for buying same.  So we hung a few candy canes, made some string balls from twine and starch and balloons, and carefully cut lacy snowflakes.  That year I knitted my new husband a green sweater with sleeves twice as long as his arms.  He painted a tiny recipe box for me and pasted "Good Things You Can Fix" on top.

The photograph is the few snowflakes that remain after all these years.  I framed them last year for a gift for Joe.  This year we will remember our 1964 snowflakes when we make paper snowflakes with our grandchildren.  If you have never cut a snowflake, try this project.  You will agree with Charles Dickens - "It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself."

For some wonderfully fancy paper snowflakes, visit  www.bontempsbeignet.blogspot.ca/2011/11/faux-sneaux-flakes.html

Again!

                                   
                       Howard Teal and his first grandson, Sean Parker, Christmas 1968


This picture speaks to me of Christmas past and Christmas present, even Christmas yet to come.  My Daddy is holding our first son. How proud he was!  Sean loved his Papa, and already loved books. They are delighting each other with the reading of The Night Before Christmas.  Can't you hear "...up the chimney he rose?"  With this book, as in most, arriving at the last page meant "again, read it again!"

So, as I bring in the boxes of decorations and begin pulling out all the old familiar ornaments and set up the manger scenes, I am brimming with both tears and smiles, thinking how good it is to do it again.  I set up our advent wreath and candles and fill the big basket with all the children's Christmas books read and reread so many times.  I stack my Christmas piano music and practice the arrangements of White Christmas and Silent Night that I have played for so many years now.  I  am thankful that I did most purchases for gifts before Thanksgiving, so that shopping is not on my to do list, and I can spend  more time re-calibrating during Advent.  I listen to my favorite Christmas CD, James Galway's Christmas Carol.  On the way to Bethlehem, again.

Innkeepers

At this time of year for a number of years, Joe and I became innkeepers.  No, we didn't open a  Bed and Breakfast, but we did set up a cozy inn with a fireplace and welcome guests so that we could share our stories.  Our church, First Baptist Church in Richmond, Texas, has a custom of offering a gift to our community each year at Christmastime, called Experiencing Christmas.  This is not the expected scenes from a live nativity, as special as those can be - but a group of people who put on the characters from the Christmas story like they put on the robes and headwraps.  We became Jacob and Rachel, innkeepers who find a place for the holy family that is clean and quiet and away from the public, their stable.  As small groups of guests came in to sit by our fire and talk to us, we talked about our fears, our amazement, our wonder, our belief.

Every year, the drama changes to tell different parts of the story, and this year, the inn changes too.  It will come after groups have finished their walk through the story scenes.  But Jacob and Rachel will still offer their hospitality in a reception area.  No cookies and punch though - there will be flatbreads and cheese, olives, and dates, and pomegranates.  Looks like I just can't get out of the kitchen.  But then I don't really want to.  Welcome to our inn!

Gratitude for Hand Me Downs

                                     
        Thanksgiving memories: Quilt from Mary Clyde Curley Terrell and Opal Terrell Teal

I grew up in the 40's and 50's in a small town in East Texas. I remember ration stamps during the war, “butter” that we made out of white stuff that we mixed with coloring to make it yellow, tea towels made from flour sacks, and patchwork quilts made from the scraps of fabric leftover from clothes sewed by my grandmother and mother. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” was really practiced. Men's shirt collars were turned when they became worn, and socks were darned. Mending was an important word in our vocabulary.

I learned to do handwork like embroidery and crochet from Mother and Grandma, but I took a sewing course from the local Singer Sewing machine store when Mother got a new electric sewing machine to replace her treadle Singer. The course came free with the purchase and she already knew how to sew, so I took the lessons, made a dress and jacket, and modeled them in a fashion show for the last lesson. I remember working over the scalloped neckline and sleeves of a teal blue outfit and wearing it proudly. I was 8 years old. After that, Mother and I worked together on making my clothes. I learned from her to shop for fabric bargains, the reason I still have yards of fabric stored for the time when the right need appears. We always planned something pretty for the first day of school. When I was in high school, I would sketch a design for a prom or banquet gown and was never disappointed at the results. My outfits were always one of a kind!

Even so, I did a happy dance when the occasional box of hand me downs arrived in the mail from my cousin in South Texas. Marcia Lee was 6 years older than me, and all her clothes were store bought! She had a younger brother and no one to pass down to, so I was the glad recipient. I never grumbled about wearing second hand. I was aware, however, that not everyone felt special wearing not-new things. My younger sister had a lot of hand-me-downs!

Today, there is a revival of appreciation for used clothing and other worn items. We call it repurposing or recycling. I am reminded of the wisdom of my parents and grandparents. The root of the concept of passing something on is the word “give.” Making something we no longer can use or need available to someone else is a gift, both to ourselves and that one who receives it. As we donate, pass down, relinquish, and turn over things, or receive those which have been made available to us, we are acting out a physical image of a much larger passing down, the transmitting and endowment of a priceless legacy. 

My cousin passed down clothes.  Mother and Grandma handed me down so much more.  The quilt in the photo is a passed down treasure with its patches from dresses worn 70 years ago by all three of us.  Every patch and stitch reminds me of the gifts of themselves handed on to me that live beyond me in the lives of my sons and granddaughters. 

"And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously,handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read."  ~ Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Garden
 
"My work in the world is to catch fire, to bloom, and to unleash my own secret words."  ~ Christine Valters Paintner

Richmond, Texas

For the first twenty-eight years of my marriage, we moved alot.  Twenty one times, in fact.  There were assorted apartments, duplexes, old houses, new houses, even a 3 month sojourn in a hotel in Indonesia.  Every time we moved, we said our goodbyes to one place and our hellos to another with the glad anticipation that in yet another place, we would make a home.  And we did.  But when we returned to the United States after living in Jakarta for nearly five years, we settled in a place that has been home for twenty years now. We have lived in two different houses, but within the same neighborhood.  We have a Sugar Land, Texas postal address, but live just beyond the edge of the Richmond, Texas city limits.  Although our work and shopping may take us frequently into Sugar Land and beyond into Houston, our feeling of community is in our neighborhood and in the small town of  Richmond.  There is our church, and a sense of returning to the kind of small town which nurtured me in my growing up years.

Freeways and cell phones and internet connections may link our lives in ways I could never have imagined as a young girl but I am rooted in this place and with these people.  Appreciation of history is strong here, as evidenced in a recent anniversary celebration for the town.  I love to be at home here.

Marlin

What do these things have in common other than the fact they are all colored glass?  I could say that all three pieces belonged to my mother, as did the aluminum tray. They were all originally purchased in what was once termed a "five and dime" store.  True, too that each piece of glass reflects a part of childhood images: the little cruet filled with vinegar for my mother's favorite wilted lettuce salad, the ashtray once holding Daddy's Lucky Strike cigarette ashes, the candy bowl that held lemon drops.

My story is not about where the items came from, or what they were used for.  It is the story of how they changed from plain clear glass to the colors of honey and amber. Each one of these pieces was carried on one of our family's rare summer trips for an unusual purpose.  Hardly a vacation, still somewhere to go and much anticipated, Mother, Daddy, my sister Janice, and I for several years traveled from our home in Jacksonville, Texas down to central Texas to a similar sized town where we stayed in a tiny motel room cooking our own meals.  There were no theme or waterparks, little scenic attraction, and no relatives to visit.

 Why would we use Daddy's precious one week of time off from work to do this?  One reason:  Marlin, Texas had a mineral hot springs. Located about four miles east of the Brazos River,   Marlin had a clinic and bath house where people with various ailments (Daddy had rheumatism) could go for a round of hot mineral baths as healing therapy.  Daddy signed up for a week's worth of the baths at the bathhouse. He encouraged us to drink the mineral water for its health benefits, but I hated the taste. Mother, my sister, and I amused ourselves in various ways, the most exciting thing being taking dime store glass to the mineral water fountain in the center of town and leaving it for the hot mineral salts to splash over  We checked it every day. Yes, it was still there, along with assorted other glass objects that people had left - to my knowledge, no one ever took anyone else's glass.  By the end of the week, the glass had turned varying degrees of golden colors, an enchanting kind of magic to me. 

It was a long time before I learned more of Marlin's history. While digging to find a water supply for Marlin’s 2,500 residents in 1891,  engineers struck sulfur-laden water that gushed out of the ground at 147 degrees F. Several physicians interested in the curative properties established clinics, bathhouses and sanitariums. More wells were drilled, hotels and boarding houses opened their doors, and by 1900, Marlin was a popular spa emphasizing medical water treatments. The New York Giants baseball team trained there from 1908 to 1919.  Some think it was not  mere coincidence that the Giants won the National League pennant in 1911, 1912 and 1913.

In the 1920s, the Marlin Hot Wells Foundation for Crippled Children established a hospital to treat young polio victims  In 1929, Conrad Hilton built his eighth Hilton Hotel in his chain in Marlin, a nine-floor, 110 room Falls Hotel, which could be seen for miles from the city limits of Marlin. Across the street was the Marlin Sanitarium Bathhouse. An underground tunnel connected the two buildings. A fire destroyed the underground tunnel, the Sanitarium Bath House was torn down, and the Falls Hotel was closed. Despite sporadic attempts to revive them, Marlin’s mineral-water establishments were pretty much gone by the 1960's.

 The hotel remains the tallest building in Falls County. The location of the bath house is now the city post office and a gazebo park. Another former hotel, the Arlington Hotel on Coleman Street, is now the location of a Mexican restaurant, Lupita's, and the Marlin Inn.

Today, you can drink mineral water  from a fountain from that era, right next to the Chamber of Commerce Office. You can soak your feet too, (they've thoughtfully provided a separate facility for that )  Water has laxative properties, which locals have timed at 43 minutes!.  I think it is fun to visit the fountain, but I don't seen any glassware transformation going on there these days.  I still don't drink the water, but Lupita's is a great place for lunch.