23rd Century Antique

One of the best gifts to give is something you've noticed the recipient secretly coveting. She doesn't buy it because she can't afford it, thinks it a splurge, doesn't really "need" it, or whatever. You run back and buy it when she's not around, knowing it's guaranteed to be a hit.
I got one of those presents the other day, a belated Christmas gift from my friend Lorna. It's a little ornament. She was mainly interested in getting it to me before I took my Christmas tree down. Fat chance of that! I'm giving myself a deadline of Valentine's Day for that thankless chore.

I first saw these cunning little wooden ornaments at the Ashfield Fall Festival. Lorna lives in Ashfield, as does the artist, Kurt Meyer, so they were familiar to her. I'd never seen his work before.

I was impressed by the craftsmanship, and by the elegant simplicity. Kurt Meyer spent part of his childhood in Japan, and it shows. His boxes especially are marvels of intricate precision joinery. Tiny ring boxes fan open to four times their size to reveal a compartment lined in ultrasuede. Small as they are, they are made up of nearly 600 fingers and notches. My little ornament is formed of 32 separate pieces of wood.

Meyer uses only sustainably harvested domestic and exotic hardwoods, and never any paints, dyes, or stains. Many of the materials are waste from other woodworkers' projects. All the colors come from the natural hues of the various woods. My ornament is made of padauk, poplar, yellow heart, and walnut.

Meyer calls his company "23rd Century Antiques," which he feels signifies both the heirloom quality and durability of his product. Although he started out in the Pacific northwest, he's found his niche in Western Massachusetts, surrounded by lots of creative people and lots of trees. Besides nature and the creative energy of Ashfield, he's inspired by William Morris's News From Nowhere, a quote from which he puts on his website:

"Work will be a pleasure and work will be a sharing when the things we make are born out of beauty and of need."

Woodstock Chime

One of my favorite Christmas gifts this year was a wind chime, carefully selected by my daughter, Cordelia. It's a top-of-the-line Woodstock Gregorian^® alto chime. I've already got a couple of wind chimes on my front porch, but this one is special.

Woodstock chimes, created by professional musician Garry Kvistad, are precision-tuned to various scales. Each note is pure and beautiful. They don't simply jangle in the wind, but seem rather to be playing a little song.

In nice weather I spend many an afternoon on my wide front porch, sitting on the glider as I read, eat, or visit, listening to a pair of rather boisterous chimes. So I decided my new gift should hang in the back of the house, where it could be heard from the kitchen or loft. Amir, who's extremely agile, hung it from the soffit outside of the window behind my desk. With the window closed, it's a sweet and haunting faraway song. In breezy warmer weather, when I can open the window, the music will be pleasanter still.

In previous summers, I listened to the drunks in the park and the trash-talking adolescents on the basketball court behind me as I worked. Recently the Parks Department has been making improvements, and perhaps by next summer the new paving and plantings and the operational fountain will encourage a politer crowd. Birdsong, the plashing of the fountain, and these Gregorian alto chimes may be all that I hear. Well, I can always hope.

Blue Christmas

The Christmas trees of my childhood were scraggly affairs, spindly firs with big gaps between the branches, the kind of trees you had to turn and turn to find the least bad side. In addition to lights and ornaments, my mother decorated them with real tinsel and angel hair, which went a long way towards filling in the holes. The finished product, with the big colored bulbs glowing like technicolor spiderwebs through the angel hair, was magical to my child's eyes.

Of the many boxes of decorations we used to use, nothing remains. My favorite ornaments were a set of hard plastic reindeer, including a Rudolph with a red nose. They were cheap and brittle, the paint half rubbed off, some of them missing a leg or a tail. How often have I wished for just one of those little reindeer!

Today I have many expensive and beautiful Christmas ornaments; I can't seem to get enough. Maybe it's Rosebud syndrome...compulsive collecting when all I really want is a simple childhood memory. Every year I collect one more, representative of the year gone by. A Christopher Radko gingerbread house to celebrate my first paycheck after a long spell of stay-at-home mommyhood. A delicate hand-blown ball from Munich. Purple grapes from Beaujolais; a paler cluster from Champagne. A glass slipper and a clock striking midnight for the millenium.

This year, I took advantage of my holiday visit to Manhattan to purchase something for this year. It's blue glass, in honor of my visit in August to "blue, the Inn on the Beach" in Newburyport. Two nights in a romantic and beautiful room directly on a deserted beach, under a full moon, provided at no cost to me as a member of the press--followed by a check in the mail for the review I sold. That's a memory I want to keep.

Christmas Pancakes

One thing all of my kids can do is cook. Once in a while they'll treat me to a meal, which is one of the nicest things you can do for anybody. And since they know their way around a kitchen, it'll taste good, too.

Amir treated his mother to a breakfast of pancakes this morning. He made the syrup as well. For some reason, both of my boys prefer this recipe, which I made up, even to real maple syrup. It's sugar and just a couple of spoons of water brought to a boil in a heavy pan. Then some cinnamon and plenty of heavy cream swirled in. Then some vanilla once it's off the heat.

Homemade pancakes, homemade syrup, a caffè e latte made with my little Bialetti....who needs Santa Claus?

Nothing Says Welcome Like a Hubcap

For many years, I lived in rural sections of Wilbraham on acres and acres of land. Every December, I'd cut branches of white pine, hemlock, blue spruce, yew, holly, mountain laurel, and whatever else I could get my hands on that was green. I'd make wreaths and swags and kissing balls. I'd festoon the bay windows and doorways with garlands. I'd twine roping around the front doors, railings and banisters. I was a regular Martha Stewart around the holidays.

Since moving to downtown Springfield, I've had less time and less access to evergreenery. Yet I've usually still managed to scrounge stuff, like the times I came upon the downed pine tree, or the abandoned Christmas tree lot with its pile of leftover branches, or the giveaway last year at Walmart. This year, however, I had no such luck. I had a tree, but that was about it.

Well, I also had some oversized glass balls that I'd been stockpiling, but had never used. Amir, always a good sport, agreed to put them up for me on the porch. I gave him instructions to hang them at different heights, and left the rest to him. I think he did a pretty good job.

I snipped enough off my scraggly backyard pine tree and pathetic little holly bush to make one swag over the kitchen door. No way I could stretch the stuff into a pair of wreaths for the double doors, though. I was feeling very frustrated, but then I thought, why not just let yourself go with the urban flow? The essence of a wreath is its circular form, and circular forms you've got aplenty. Even two that match. I knew I was collecting those hubcaps for something.

Trees Just Want to Be Free

This is my fifth Christmas at the Emory House. I moved in on December 22, 2003. Things were pretty disorganized at first, obviously, and there was no time to do much decorating. Cordelia came over with a little plant from the grocery store, a gardenia decorated with tiny colored balls. At least we could say we had a tree.

2004 was the year of Tent City. I had befriended Bob Chamberlain, a.k.a. John Horne, one of the residents. Bob was a registered nurse with plenty of work, but no transportation. I gave him many rides, more meals, and even more cups of tea, and he did many favors for me in return. One of them was to buy me a magnificent tree, which scraped the ten-foot ceiling of my parlor. We had to go to a certain special nursery near his old house in Longmeadow, where he had always shopped for Christmas trees. I was ecstatic.

In 2005, I went back to the same nursery to get another one of those fantastic trees, but the place was closed up for the winter, with a sign that read, "No Trees This Year." I tried Bluebird Acres in East Longmeadow, where I used go when I lived in Wilbraham. It was out of business. I tried the center of Wilbraham, where the Lions Club had its annual Christmas tree sale. The stakes and ropes and a few leftover branches were there, but no more trees. The same with the lot on Page Boulevard I had passed several times earlier in the month. I ended up at Rocky's Hardware, buying a dry and scraggly eight-footer for $25. One decorated, it looked great, however.

In 2006, I again waited till the last minute. I drove Trusty the Toyota in the direction of Wilbraham, picking up my cousin Geri on the way. We stopped by Walmart first on another errand, and what did we see but a sign that read, "All Trees--$0.00." Walmart was closing up their garden shop and throwing out all the greenery. Everything was free. I dragged the tallest tree, a ten-footer, to my car and strapped it to the roof. Then we stuffed the trunk and back seat with as many swags, wreaths, and lengths of roping as we could fit.

Things weren't looking too promising in the tree department this year. I was feeling broke, as usual, and had heard that prices were going up because of increased trucking costs. Fewer people are buying live trees, so there are fewer places selling them. Living downtown as I do and rarely driving anywhere, I wasn't familiar with any sale locations at all, let alone the best ones. Plus I had just totaled poor Trusty. Riding aimlessly all over town in the snow in my convertible didn't really appeal.

Walking the dog last week with my friend Brian, I spotted a Christmas tree next to a dumpster. It was half covered in snow.

"You're not thinking of taking that tree, are you?" he asked, knowing my frugal bent. "It's not even a whole tree--it's only a sawed-off bottom."

I wasn't sure about that. But I wasn't in the mood to deal with wrestling it home, so the matter was moot. Yesterday, however, when the weather was starting to look iffy and I still had no tree, my mood was different. There was the tree still--only now it was IN the dumpster. On the plus side, the dumpster was otherwise empty and the tree looked clean. And it was a whole tree. It looked to be about seven feet tall.

As I walked the dog home, I made up my mind. The tree was only about a thousand feet from my house. Time was getting short. A lonely, friendless tree and a broke, treeless woman: a match made in heaven.

I dragged the tree home. Ali gave it a fresh cut. Amir placed it in the stand. I decorated it. And it looks pretty good, imho. I wonder what next year will bring?

Party Party

Holiday season is definitely upon us. Last night was not one, but two parties in the neighborhood for me. First was cocktails at the McIntosh, a very cool condo complex around the corner from me. The McIntosh is a converted shoe factory with high ceilings, exposed brick walls, huge windows, and other neat features. Almost half of the Downtown Book Ladies live there.

Book Lady Kathy was throwing a bash for her sister, Carol. How she managed to make it a surprise, if she did succeed, I have no idea, as they live right next door to one another. At least forty people showed up while I was there. The noise problem was solved by inviting most of the neighbors.

After I had sampled as many hors d'oeuvres as I could decently get away with, downed a couple of glasses of cava, sampled the Lillet punch, and of course chatted with everyone I knew, I followed Anna--another book lady--over to Kimball Towers, another condo complex a block away. The Kimball was the original Sheraton, very stately and grand. The first-floor meeting rooms are popular with the Armoury-Quadrangle Civic Association, which traditionally holds its holiday party there.

Jana Byrd was playing her sax, somebody who looked like Santa Claus but sounded suspiciously like Robert Louder had just handed out presents to the kids, and a few people were still sitting around. The three long tables holding beverages and tiered dishes of fancy pastries had been rather decimated, but I was stuffed anyway. Steve Baribeau, who headed up AQCA with me a couple of years ago, had an empty chair next to him, and I was happy to see him. Both homeowners, we chatted about--what else?--the cost of utilities, and our valiant efforts to deal with the cost of not freezing to death in New England. A sign of the times.

Singing Christmas Trees

My son's girlfriend is a dancer, just out of college and looking for a hot job. For the last couple of summers, she worked more than full time at Six Flags. Part of her job involved an endlessly repetitive dance routine. When she wasn't dancing, she was being sawed in half by a magician. The box she had to crawl into was pretty small, and most of the time she had dark bruises on her skin from squeezing into it. I'd have to say she's quite a trouper.



Right now Lindsay's teaching in a dance studio and going to lots of auditions. Her dream job at this point would be working at Disneyworld or on a cruise ship. She usually gets pretty far into the auditions, she says, but invariably gets cut after the singing part.

So I thought of Lindsay when, walking through Macy's the other day, I saw these three young ladies dolled up as Christmas trees. L should be able to handle this job if she wants it next year. Having the nerve to do a song-and-dance routine in the heart of New York city while wearing this getup is apparently key...actual vocal talent a distant second.

White Christmas

I love miniature things, so I surprised myself by finding all the NYC Christmas window dioramas rather boring. Am I getting old and jaded? The period vignettes in Lord and Taylor's were beautifully done, I have to admit. Each window celebrated one sense--"taste" or "touch," for example. The craftsmanship and the detail were astounding, but...

...I much preferred the elegant mannequins in gossamer ivory designer gowns. That's my idea of a white Christmas.

To Deck or Not to Deck

Downtown Book Ladies met last night. I guess we spent fifteen minutes helping ourselves to wine and food, five minutes discussing the book, half an hour gossiping, and the rest of the evening discussing various aches and pains. The weather's a bitch and it feels good to grumble.

It was so unseasonably warm for so long this fall that it doesn't feel like the holiday season's upon us. I stay out of stores as much as possible, don't read the paper, watch TV, or listen to the radio, so I'm pretty much out of the loop anyway. Walking into Carol's cozy condo in the McIntosh building, I was surprised to see it fully decked out for Christmas. And boy, did it look adorable. When you've got a manageable space, good taste, and no pets, there's a lot you can do.

My usual modus operandi is to decorate on Christmas Eve, or very close to it, and leave everything in place till Epiphany. I'm flat out with work right now, not to mention flat broke, and Silvie's not going on any unnecessary errands until she gets her studded snow tires put on. But this little snow village gave me an irresistible desire to buy a ten-foot-tall live tree, get out my fifteen or so boxes of garlands and lights and ornaments, and deck my own halls.