The weekend newspaper is once again featuring “home tours” – houses that are decorated to reflect the owners’ taste, refinement, and yes, excessive amounts of time and money. One featured today is a stately older home in Salem. It looks really quite impressive – a tree in every room, greenery and bows sweeping up a regal banister. Sprays of holly and evergreen bursting from vases that were probably picked up at Southeby’s. Dining table displays that leave little room for Christmas dinner. That family must eat on tray tables in the basement. Even the kitchens and bathrooms are decorated. This family has graciously “opened their home”, as many affluent residents of equally affluent communities with impressive antique homes do, to visitors wishing to see the fruits of their, or their designers’, labors.
We’re not doing that again this year. Our daughter lugged the artificial tree up from the basement over Thanksgiving so I wouldn’t break or dismember something attempting it myself. We have two sets of house decorations – those that we actually use each year, stored conveniently in a closet, and then a major warehouse in the basement. Some folks have entire Christmas villages in storage somewhere – most likely the attic or the basement warehouse. They command prominent real estate somewhere in the house for all to see. They might light up, or have miniature trains passing through. We don’t. Even the stable, built for our nativity scene is really too big to be placed anywhere prominent now. We still keep the ceramic figures, which are beautiful, but they’re grouped where they’ll fit. Most of the basement decorations haven’t been seen in years, as I have adopted an “out of sight, out of mind” philosophy.
I guess that overdecorating is a tradition that’s been building for generations. We see pictures of Victorian England, where even the streetlamps wore festive bows and greenery. Houses had wreaths and “boughs of holly” draped across windows and doorways. Candles in the windows. Early New Englanders, with their Puritan outlook, didn’t do much decorating for Christmas, and as I get older, that works. Today, there are more and more enthusiasts that “go big” outside, because technology – in particular, electricity, has advanced their holiday vision. They feel a compelling need to share their joy with everyone, much like those that have a theatre sound system in their cars so we all can hear. Their every wish has been fulfilled by the manufacturers of inflatable Christmas Characters. Their front yard lights up like the Strip in Vegas and would certainly bring a smile to Clark Griswold’s face. One home in town was a showcase of lights and every imaginable decoration. The irony was that there were so many lights, the owner could only afford to turn on this extravaganza for an hour or two each night. The good news about this extensive display is that their handiwork will hopefully come down soon after the holidays. The bad news is that they’re already planning something equally lavish for Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, or an equally tasteless Easter. (On a side note, these are often the same people for whom the community fireworks aren’t good enough, so they blow off hands, feet, and the back deck expressing the exuberance of July 4th.)
As I wrote before, when the Princess was little, she desperately wanted to have lights strung on a large fir tree in the front yard. She’d express this desire every year without fail. As the tree was two stories high or more, that was daunting and a bit impractical without renting a cherry-picker. We compromised by my putting a small, elegant string of lights on the lilac bush next to the house. It was quite striking for passers-by, I thought. Not a view that’s universally shared, though. It’s still referred to in our house each and every year with derision as the year of the “sad clump of lights on the lilacs”.
So, we’ve managed to pare down the house decorations to some treasures. A couple made by the Princess in her early days – a milk carton Santa, a reindeer from a brown paper lunch bag. You know those things. Products of school classrooms to cherish. I remember, growing up, a wall-sized mural of Santa’s sleigh and the reindeer flying overhead that I’d made in about first or second grade. It’s most likely gone to a fiery inferno someplace, but my mother hung it up faithfully each year. All sweet memories, but not really suitable for a “house tour”.
In the early days of our life together, we started on the road to “collectibles”. There were the yearly purchases of Norman Rockwell ornaments. They somehow ended up in the basement warehouse, in a box that sadly was placed under a leaky pipe. They are barely recognizable now, and at some point, I’ll take them up to the dumpster. There are other boxes of tree ornaments too, because, as Her Ladyship and I were both teachers, we’d get either ornaments or Christmas coffee cups from our students. Lovely and thoughtful, but at one point when we were moving, I took three or four boxes of cups to a local thrift shop. I do hope someone is using them somewhere. And too, that’s how decorations seem to accumulate. We find something we can’t live without at a craft fair. The angel that tops our tree each year came from a church fair, and it’s beautiful – almost 40 years old. The face was made from a nylon stocking, and Elizabeth, in her innocent and socially unaware childhood, named her “black baby”. When Lizzie shipped off to DC for college, we started collecting White House tree ornaments because we wanted something DC-ish, and have continued each year. We now have over thirty. Enough for a couple of good-sized trees. We’ve also collected ornaments from our various trips, and the Princess has done the same, so we have some from England, from Prague, Paris, Vienna, and most recently Berlin. (The one in Germany, not northern New Hampshire). Life comes full circle. When we’re young, we collect what we can. As we get older, and have expanded the collections, the displays get more elaborate. And finally, moving into, well, senior-hood and downsizing, we either pass them on or toss them out, expediency triumphant over sentiment. Elizabeth tends toward a minimalist approach to Christmas. We’ve suggested regularly that she take some of what we have to decorate – currently an apartment in Atlanta. She’s declined the offers. Funny story, though. When she was in DC, she was living with her dear friend, Jackie, who loved decorating for the holidays, and insisted that they get a tree. Not just any tree, though. Jackie wanted one roughly the size of the one at Rockefeller Center. They settled on a live tree about 9 feet tall, which they then had to get home on the subway. If you’ve seen the Griswold’s “Christmas Vacation” movie, where they go into the wilderness to cut a massive tree, this was the subway version. The two of them received a lot of surprised and amused looks from other Metro riders.
I’ve developed a tendency to think ahead – not in all areas, but this one. Whatever goes up must ultimately come down and be packed away, and if you’re like us, the space where they went is now filled with more stuff we got for Christmas. More decorations, new clothes, or stuff that can’t be used until the warm weather. More books, so another bookshelf is called for. There seems to be an elastic relationship between trying to get rid of ”stuff” and buying more. There was a time when Her Ladyship was collecting, or was given Dreamsicles. They lived in every room on every flat surface, and my niece remarked that we had more than the Hallmark store in which she worked. Most are gone now, but the Christmas ones are still around and, I think, reproducing in the box where they’re kept.
So, as the holidays rapidly approach, and they certainly did this year, we’re hoping to survive. That we haven’t overdone the gifts, and that they’ll fit under the tree. It’s been snowing again and the holly bushes are buried, so we’ll skip the traditional mantle greens. The tree is up and looks good, but that’s about the only thing that would impress anyone on the house tour. I threw up some wreaths yesterday, with a couple of bows I managed to find at Walmart. So, again, not The Breakers, Marble House, or Biltmore. Not enough to sell tickets to the tour. Just enough for the few friends and family that might drop by. But the tour is cancelled. Visitors are not welcome. We’re turning off the lights and locking the doors. Joy to the World.
I'm Thinking...No! 