4 posts tagged “christmas”

Last night I went to a Lutheran 11 o'clock service with my aunt, who was raised Lutheran and went to eleven o'clock services her whole childhood. It was lovely.

One of the more involved of my family's traditions is making Christmas ornaments (or "Christmas balls," as we call them).

These ornaments are about five inches in diameter, they're covered in hundreds of Swarovski crystals, and they're  made by hand. They got started by my great-great-great grandmother. One year, the family's Christmas tree burnt down, because they used to put candles on the branches in good old German style. From then on, Christmas trees were forbidden. So instead, they would put up a Christmas ladder. On it, of course, the decorations had to be many times more intricate, because the ladder itself was so ugly.

My great-great aunt made ornaments a little smaller than the one depicted to the right. For the fabric, she would use important dresses' fabric -- my mother has one from her sophomore year homecoming, her junior prom, and from when she was a bridesmaid in her friend Diana's wedding. In essentials, though, my great-great aunt's ornaments look like the one on the right, with a crown and a tail and so on.

A few years ago, my mother started making these ornaments. She's always gone all out for Christmas. For one thing, she makes a pudding each year, which is incredibly complex -- have you ever tried making one? The weather turns and the pudding falls in and then we're all in a tizzy because, for God's sake, it isn't Christmas without pudding and hard sauce!

Since she's been making them, she's found something of a market for them -- fine goods stores, specifically a French import store that sold her some of the vintage ribbons and beads and fabric she likes to use. (She frequently complains that they don't make such nice fabric as they used to, anymore). But most of them still are produced as Christmas gifts for our big extended family.

Just sharing one tradition. If you want to see more of her awesome Christmas ornaments, which take 10-20 hours of labor to make (each crystal is placed individually, by hand, with tweezers) some are here.

So, I was supposed to take the Coast Starlight to Sacramento two days ago (that is, overnight between Friday and Saturday). We started off with a rousing 5-hour wait, since the windstorm that hit the Pacific Northwest on Thursday night had shut down the tracks between Seattle and Portland. When the train finally got there, we all boarded (with a sigh of relief)... but when I woke up in the morning, I discovered that we hadn't even reached Klamath Falls. We had been stopped since 3 AM because the track had broken in front of us. 

You know when your childhood has well and truly faded?

When you try to think up the Christmas gifts you'd like to have --- not that you have any intention of making a list, but just as an idle daydream --- and the only things you can think of are, "I could use a new umbrella. Maybe one of the ones that's black on top but has a blue sky underneath." "I need a computer sleeve. I keep dropping my bag and crossing my fingers, but sooner or later I'll be unlucky." "Socks! I don't really own enough socks, do I."

I've done it. I've gone into the world of boring, practical adults.

But dammit, I want a pony!