…my husband and I were just saying to each other. We have propped up this year’s Christmas tree at the side of our non-working fireplace (safety first!) and have liberally decorated the rest of our apartment with the trappings of the season. What a wonderland!
Oh, the lights (some battery powered, some plugged into the octopuses sprouting out of every wall outlet), the scents of the season (although a couple of the candles had to go immediately because they made our eyes water), and the sounds of carols lifting our spirits as we decorated (only periodically quarrelling about which trinket goes where)! Is there anything as satisfying as decking your halls for the Holiday Season?
Although our Christmas tree is a real one, the (truly majestic) display of perfectly arranged boughs with which we have adorned the mantle of our non-working fireplace, painstakingly weaving in battery operated twinkle lights so that it looks as if Santa himself lives here, are plastic. The saving grace, of course, is that we rarely let the level of illumination in the living room rise above the brightness of the cluster of candles so tastefully arranged in the non-functioning fireplace. There is no way that people walking by our house and peering through our windows would be able to tell that those boughs hadn’t been hauled straight out of the forest by a team of jingle-bell encrusted Clydesdales!
We zhuzhed the wreath that belongs on the apartment door (though garish in the hallway lighting) and pulled out every single ornament for the tree so that it could be examined and a careful verdict made about whether it belonged in the magazine-ready Christmas tableau ‘we’ were aiming for.
Long hours of decidedly unhealthy snacking went into the afternoon’s endeavors and we finally found ourselves winding down from the sugar high and the sheer volume of work that it takes to make this tiny and unassuming apartment reflect all of the joy and magic that we are hoping to find during this beautiful Season.
In unspoken agreement, we stopped flittering around each room in turn, satisfied that we’d added enough trinkets to every flat surface and fastened just enough temporary hooks to the walls and mantle to do the trick without going all the way over the top.
We lit the candles and surveyed the room from our slouchy positions on the loveseat, with of a mug of doctored hot chocolate in one hand since the other hand was still sticky from spending a bit too much time in the bowl of caramel popcorn. We congratulated each other on a terrific job, and speculated that this year’s displays were quite frankly the best we’d ever been able to pull off! High sticky fives!
Neither of us said it out loud, but it still felt like there was something SOMETHING missing. What could we possibly have overlooked after all that? Where was that extra bit of Christmas?
And then, one turned to the other and remarked that they had a sparkle on their cheek. No, to the left a bit…up…oh, let me get it. Scraping sparkles off each other might seem like a Hallmark movie moment, but it’s a stretch to find the romance in facial glitter removal.
But wait, suddenly we both had sparkles on our faces. The loveseat seemed to have bits of glitter wedged into places that we didn’t even remember having used. We found glitter on the bottoms of his socks and sleeve of my sweater, and somehow a bunch of it got sprinkled on the mat in the bathroom!
Ahhhh, THEN it felt like Christmas!
Every decorative bough or wreath or tree ornament just seems to off-gas sparkles that stick themselves through sheer willpower to skin, clothing, and pet fur of all breeds.
We opened up the fridge to put the eggnog away and found a glint of glitter coming off the top of the yogurt container! How??? Although we have hoovered and carefully wiped off the table that we’d used as ‘Decorations Central’ to unpack our many boxes of Christmas accoutrement, for the entire Holiday Season, nay, for the rest of the winter, we will continue to find the occasional fleck of sparkle quietly amusing itself while it waits to be noticed. Usually by guests we have over for dinner. Often in late April.
At the end of the long day we will change into our cozy Christmas Season pajamas and as we throw back the duvet on our bed, one of us will inevitably point out a sparkle trying unsuccessfully to hide under the edge of a pillow. Who brought that in? And WHEN? This stuff gets everywhere!
The Christmas Season is a fount of mysterious events that can not be explained through logic or science, so it is best to accept that we silly humans are just not meant to know all of the answers to all of the mysteries of the Season.
And that includes how one burnt out mini-light can take down the entire string of 100 bulbs, how ‘tacky’ can turn into ‘charming’ if the lighting is just right, and how glitter can get into a covered butter dish.
May you accept these and many other Seasonal mysteries as your own Holidays begin to sparkle!
