CHRISTMAS PRESENT

Our dearest Christmas Dreams came true last night, with the arrival of our sweet new Grandson.  He and his Mommy and Daddy and Big Brother are all just fine, and in a state of wonder and joy, as are we all.

 

 

He brings our number of Grands to Eight-and-Two-Greats, and we are truly blessed. 

 

FIND YOUR DREAM

Into every Christmas season, there floats a bit of lagniappe or two, just happening along to Bright you.  Sometimes these floating, ethereal wonders have the gentle touch of a caught breath, and others have the impact of a crescendo-wave---they sweep you away so fast and so far that you’re swirling and swallowing and tumbling, and at last left gasping on the damp sand.

Caro called down the stairs just now, “Mama, when you have a minute, look at the program from Rockefeller Center.   It’s all cued up, and you just can’t miss this song---it’s real and she’s not just pretending for the camera like the others---you can even see her breath fogging the air.”

And a voice like this seems as if it WOULD dominate and take over the entire being to whom it’s entrusted.  It must have a life of its own, brilliant with tone, and vibrant with joy and power.

I hope you’ll watch---I’d love to share this Christmas GIFT with you.  It will leave you breathless.

rachel

SCENTS OF CHRISTMAS

When I was growing up, our Winter dining room always smelled of apples and rustly paper and the velvety linings of all the buffet drawers where the set of Michelangelo, with its six extra serving pieces AND the Hostess Set, resided amongst all the half-burned candles and the fountain pens and used-up husks of checkbooks.  There was such a cold smell in there, as if you were stepping into a restaurant cooler, minus the scents of black rubber gaskets and that salty aroma of Aunt Lou’s big red Co-Cola case.

 

The entire room was red---carpet and Miss Scarlett drapes-with-cords

and even the drawer-linings and the velvety fabric in the cuts of the wood-filigree sconces.   And red was how it Smelled.   Not roses or crayons or even beets---though there was an obligatory little clear dish of the pickles on the Thanksgiving and Christmas tables---but just apples.  

Tradition still held that every stocking must have an apple in it, and perhaps an orange, with an enticing handful of mixed nuts in the shells, way down in the toe.

 

 

 

 

Nobody tore into the stocking or dumped it out on the couch---not anybody I knew.   We savored that stocking, whether family rule was open it first, or presents first.  An experimental fondle of the stocking-toe would be a mysterious thing---was that a walnut, or did it have just enough give to be a new red ball, with jacks scattered into the mix?   Brazil Nuts were easy, but could that possibly be a new bracelet-charm, perhaps a mustard-seed in its little clear faddish globe, instead of a hazelnut?  And pecans---those conjured many covetable items of their size and shape, all looked at longingly and admired in Ben Franklin for weeks before Christmas.   Little lipsticks and tiny colognes and samples from the Avon lady, saved up for stockings, or maybe even a pack or two of Red-Hots in their crinkly little sawtooth cellophane.

After the fudge-making, the table was covered with long slick sheets of Cut-Rite, with the far ends still trying to curl around the last rows of candy.   The little nut-filled patties were then stored in the golden treasure-tins which had once---once per year, in fact---held those most delightful of confections---Hostess Fruitcake.  

Not Fruit Cake---Fruitcake.  It had to be all one word, with Fruit as the emphasis, for those glistening round red cherries, glaceed within an inch of their sweet, sweet lives, and the hunks of sugary pineapple and the crisp pecan halves---those were the main ingredients.   There was just enough of a light, moist-but-the outsides-a-little-bit-crumbly cake to hold all those pounds of magic into every judiciously-doled slice. 

This is the loaf of today, but I imagine it must have come in this long-ago tin,

 

 

which for all my childhood contained Mammaw’s spools of thread.  It, on the other hand, smelled of tangy old metal and dust and Coats & Clark's fading away in the dark.

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Even the can-and-lid were beautiful, like some three-pound bauble on Marie Antoinette’s table.  The gold was patterned in lace all over, with a slightly-raised cameo effect of a serenely beautiful lady holding a cake on a plate.  And you know, not until I looked up the pictures just now, did I ever really notice the blue.  They were gold and perfect and such reliquaries of all that was covetable, even at Christmas, shining as if lit from within with some magical light.

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes I’d just go furtively work my fingers along that tight round lid, raising just one side an inch, so as to inhale that annual-only fragrance of such magnificence.   There was the scent of fruit, and browned crumb, and an elusive tang of something so rich and strange I could not name it.  And you know, that was such a holy-of-holies that it never once occurred to me to sneak a slice, or to pry one of those immense translucent cherries from their cushion of cake. They just clung there, encased like I imagined diamonds in a mine, and it was a sacred thing never to be touched, right up there with the shelf-only doll in the elaborate white dress crocheted by my Other Mammaw.   Why, we practically HAD the gold and frankincense and myrrh, right there in the dining room.

 

 

And inside the tin, the care and respect were carried on in a crisp, rustly mantle of cellophane, which was topped with a silvery doily, in turn centered with a small red satin bow.   What ELEGANCE, what charm, and even without the cake, all that beautiful would have been enough.   And with every slice, the cellophane was carefully re-arranged, the doily replaced, the bow centered, just for the import of the thing.

 

I don’t remember that the dining room ever did smell of the cake, despite my frequent open-and-close of that exotic humidor, but of apples and chocolate and vague spices, wrapped in the equally-rare chill of Winter.

And what is YOUR Scent of Christmas?



Joining my Apples and Fruitcake to Miz Beverly's Pink Saturday at How Sweet The Sound.
 

ANGEL CHORUS

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes you just stumble upon something which astounds and delights, and today was one of those days.  I saw it just a few moments ago, and with the notes and thrums and tinkles still resounding in my ears, I want to share it.

 

As an old gentleman of our community said of a lady who played piano at a local church:  “She plays everything but the cracks.”

 

This is a quartet who make the most of ONE piano, bringing out tones that Steinway only dreamt of, and using the strings in a way that Perlman would admire.

 

There’s a little ad moment at the end, but feel free to miss that---just enjoy the way they PLAY.   It will lift your heart and your spirit.

SILVER TREES AND PYRACANTHA

pinterest photo

 For several years in my childhood, silver-foil Christmas trees with their skeletal limbs encased in sparkly tinsel like Reynolds Aluminum’s dream of Heaven spent their nights in picture windows. 

   The trees came in a long narrow box, like maybe a big umbrella would come in, and you had to put it together.   It was like poking immense scratchy, frilly cocktail picks into holes in a broom handle, and about as attractive---I thought those spindly sparse things were ugly as sin, and not even the lights would save them.  It felt to me like dressing up an old scraggly twig doll in a crinoline dress---I’m sure it was SOMEBODY’S magic; it just wasn’t mine.

 Sitting on the floor beside each tree would be a motorized color-wheel flooding the room with green, red, blue, gold in a never-ending carousel of color.

It was like living  inside a perpetual traffic-light, with the addition of a blue section adding a bit of underwater whimsy to one turn of the projector.

   

Folks watched their Motorolas and Zeniths, absorbed in black and white Kraft Theater and Hallmark Hall of Fame, whilst their faces, bodies and living-room furniture were hued in that succession of four shades of light.  

I suppose we all had one of those trees at one time or another, and we just sat right down with the curtains open, eyes fixed on the comedy of Milton Berle whilst we were turned into clowns ourselves in that revolving rainbow.   People rode around to look at the lights, meeting and greeting out rolled-down windows, as we looped the blocks of our town or one of the nearby ones for that seasonal display.   As cliché as the trees are, we’d ride several miles, turning corners and following the glow, with the only variables being the size of the windows, the family visible through them, and what show was on TV.

After the heyday of those silver trees (possibly coming along and leisurely running into a  trend-blend  like cream clouding  into coffee) came the quickly-spreading fad (at least as fast as the thorny limbs would grow) of Christmas pyracantha.                                

 

Espaliered Pyracantha, to be exact, and for everybody who had one, there were two who couldn’t pronounce it.   Thoughts ranged around the Espa-leered range, with a few ventures into variants, and some of the most posh assayed the French---Es-Spale-Yerd or Es-pelli-aid. 

 Pyracanthas were exotic, beautiful things, claiming a place not given to the boxwoods and Burfordii, with their lush red clusters and  branches staple-sculpted against walls and trellises.  They were lovely plants---bright with berries and rife with thorns that would do you mischief if you handled them wrong.  

Displays ranged from big bushy berry-covered beauties, to little short scrawls like a child's first cursive.   

 

Husbands were pressed into service to brave the thorns and train the limbs into two-dimensional shapes with staples driven into the wall.     Half the houses in town had a Rorschach-in-red on one wall or another---chiefly the one with the 300-watt bulb pointed at it from its little stob stuck into the ground, and wearing a kite-tail of heavy extension cord.      These beauties had the lagniappe of serving all year round, for when the berries were not in season, just that silhouette against the bricks was like the shadowy trees on Asian screens, or the profiles of evergreens inside-painted on glass lampshades---ethereal, ghostly shadows.

Having a nicely-shaped, good-sized Pyracantha crawling up your wall gave you bragging rights, of a sort, with as many hair-dryer and bridge club discussions of fertilizer and pruning as were devoted to yellow cake mix.   Often the plants were embellished with other art, ranging from suns to moons to the ever-popular lavabos. 

And familiarity did NOT always breed correct, for the pronouncing still wavered into odd and lofty and downright uppity territory, mostly amongst the ladies, causing snickers and re-tellings of the grandest and silliest, and on more than one occasion, causing one thorn-scarred and fed-up husband to ask, “Dang, Woman---coutten you just say ’STAPLED’?” 

I cannot seem to close up the above big space---every time I try to delete or move it, it jumps farther apart.   Feel Free to fill in with anything you'd like.   A plant of your own, some musings on Christmas, pictures of your pets.   Talk amongst yourselves.