A Tribute to:

Christmas, New Years, Epiphany

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One day in mid December, a few years back, a friend looked out his window and saw a huge tree going by, as if under its own power. It was so huge that it effectively hid the small car on which it had been strapped. "I don't know who is driving that car," he said, "But that is Janet's tree!"

Often, when I got my special tree home, it touches the furniture on all sides of the room. The top always has to be cut off, so the tree can fit below the ceiling. But, somehow a miracle happens, and it finds space in the living room and still leave room for the furniture and visiting friends. I return to childhood at Christmas; I must have my trees, and my own special ornaments which bring back memories of how they came into my life and onto my tree and of the friends and family involved. Most of my ornaments are homemade.

Several bushy ropes of glimmering white tinsel snow are wrapped around the tree trunk and out onto the inner parts of its branches. I have two dozen snowballs to hang near the root of those branches, and a wide selection of clear plastic ornaments. I have several strings of lights in clear icicle form, with tiny coloured mini-bulbs inside. My other lights are white pine-cones with a clear white mini-bulb inside each. Clear plastic angels surround the top of the tree, on which an angel in white dress and wings reigns. Ivory coloured angels grace the branches of the tree below them, and give way to red apples, quilted calico and gingham balls, and the several ornaments that have been special to me through the years. Christmas corsages of many Christmases before are placed at the junction of the branches, on the flat lower branches.

With the lights of the living room turned off, this Christmas tree is magical. It brings back comfy memories, putting me in touch with those important to me but are with us on earth no longer. Perhaps Christmas is much like the Eucharist as celebrated in the Roman Catholic and Anglican communion; during those rituals, I am told, one gathers with family and friends who have gone on before.

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I remember about 12 years ago, making Christmas ornaments of calico and gingham, in red and green designs, and for some reason feeling my Great-Grandmother Isabella Macdonald, wife of Black Robert MacKay, very much with me. I felt she also revelled in the colourful Christmas designs of the cloth, and very interested in the creations I was evolving from them. Isabella Macdonald MacKay and her husband departed this life in the early 1870s, before my father was born, and now rest in the Murray cemetery deep in the woods of Earltown.

This amazed me, and I felt quite close to her in a sharing companiable way. In the Gaelic tradition, I am told, our ancestors are still with us, very present as we go through the days of our lives. Occasionally the veil between us parts slightly. Did it part, briefly, for my Great-grandmother and myself, over a shared delight? Or had I been thinking about her, which brought her into my mind in an seemingly real communication? She had passed on, more than 100 years before this experience with the calico and gingham Christmas prints.

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I have always known snow at Christmas; if no snow on December 25th, a full graveyard was prophesized. It seems to hold true, for the snow has an effective way of killing germs. I'll leave it to the scientists and the medical folks among us to explain why.

We lived half a mile from the main road, and my father often hired a snowplow to clear the lane which went through woods. Drifts seemed higher those days, perhaps because children are shorter than adults! I wish I could look out over those fields under snow again, surrounding our home which was built on a hill with the farmlands all around. Scenery in towns and cities cannot match it. I enjoy snow, and being out walking during snowstorms. Robert Frost wrote Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening and The Dust of Snow. I think I know just how he felt.

I remember mail bags coming in on the sleigh, for we never drove our car in the winter time. My father had married late in life, and there were lots of aunts and uncles around to enjoy delighting the "baby" of that extended family with Christmas presents, secure in brown paper over the merry Christmas wrappings. I loved shaking each one, guessing. Mine were the parents who insisted breakfast was over and the dishes washed before we sat down in ritual, to open our gifts. There is nothing like the delight of anticipation, as one gets through breakfast, opens the presents, listens to the Queen give her Christmas speech, enjoys Christmas dinner and visits with relatives and friends.

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One of my Christmas memories is of going to the woods with my father, and crossing the brook on a plank provided for that purpose. Snow was on the ground, and the water was high and rapid. I remember some fear, but when I was with my father such adventures were always safe for me. We went up the hill and into the woods behind, to select that one significant tree.

It was always in the corner of the dining room, decorated with those red paper bells that unfold to an intricate rich diamond designs. I still love those bells, and modern ones are now in vogue again.

Robert Frost wrote thus about Christmas Trees

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Those are memories of early childhood on the family farm, which had been in our family since the 1850s. 200 acres of field and forest, for a young girl to grow up among and roam about; at Christmas, it was winter wonderland. For more of the winter wonderland still here within Nova Scotia, especially during the Yuletide Season, follow this Christmas link!