Still here, just busy getting Christmassy

I know, I missed my usual Sunday moodling... because we headed south to see Lee's mom and dad, and when we got home, we went out Ed's Trees to get ours (a real fir from Cranbrook, closer to carbon neutral than any pvc plastic tree could ever be), and ended up decorating for Christmas. See? I think it looks kind of nice. Here's the bulk of our decorating in one picture (excepting the advent wreath, which is just out of the picture).

It wouldn't be Christmas without all the little "Smartie stockings" that Lee hung so carefully along the curtain overhang. They were made by Josie, a dear neighbour who knitted each one, and then filled them with little pill bottles full of Smarties for each of our girls when they were little. Over the years, we ended up with over 20!

And our angel has been with me since 1990. I found her in January in the bargain aisle at the Ponoka drug store. She's got such a lovely porcelain face and hands, and her little candles and the lights under her skirt make me happy. Even though the lighting makes her look a little imperious in the picture below, she's pretty special.

It's all stuff, I know... but it's stuff we've had for ages, part of our tradition, and it will be passed down to our girls, who understand that new isn't always better. We have just two small bankers boxes of decorations, so to make things look a bit more festive, I put our Christmas cards up in the dining room, and the girls like to borrow their school years' handmade ornaments to decorate their rooms some years. It's not expensive or trendy, but it's enough to give that Christmassy feeling.

How do you decorate?

My St. Barbara bouquet...

It's not working. The pear tree branches that I picked for a St. Barbara bouquet (see December 3rd's mooding on Christmas decorations) are not even thinking about budding, leafing out, or blossoming. My kids tell me that I tried this once years ago with branches from a crabapple tree, and nothing happened then, either, but that episode doesn't register in my brain at all.

So I went online to see if the German friend who told me about spring blossoms for Christmas was stringing me a line. I found the following:

Branches from a fruit tree or flowering shrub cut on St. Barbara's Day (December 4) and kept in water in a warm room will flower by Christmas. This is known as a St. Barbara's bouquet in Germany (p. 126).    

In Saints: A Visual Guide by Edward and Lorna Mornin (2006, Francis Lincoln, ISBN 139780711226067. Found under Google Books.)

Maybe our Canadian fruit trees work differently than German ones. Maybe my room isn't warm enough for the branches to bud out. Maybe a St. Barbara bouquet only blooms in Santa Barbara where there can be blossoms all year round. In a culture that has pretty much forsaken Saints for celebrities, I doubt there's anyone who does this regularly anymore. St. Barbara herself was taken off the Catholic liturgical calendar in 1969, and I suspect the generations who made her bouquets are fading away. But if you've kept the tradition alive, or you know people who make St. Barbara bouquets regularly with success, please let me know.

The failure of my St. Barbara bouquet doesn't really matter, though I would have loved to have those pear blossoms at Christmas. At the moment, our house is decorated with a simple Christmas tree and a pretty happy family. What more do we need?

Christmas decorations...

Yesterday was an enjoyable day at the clothing room. Two of my favourites came in -- Dave, a homeless guy who is always losing his backpack (and once took a Spiderman backpack because it was all we had to offer), and Fatuma, a tiny Kenyan woman who once told me, "Canada, good for children. Good education. No good for adults. I sad, sad. Miss home, no good work here." But Fatuma was in good spirits yesterday, and looking for some Christmas decorations. We managed to find two little twinkle light strings in the bottom of a box to satisfy her.

I couldn't help but think of the Amazing Grace YouTube video that went around a few years ago. Maybe you saw it, but if not, punch "Amazing Grace Christmas Lights" into the YouTube search box, and I'm sure it will come up. I won't post it here because, frankly, it makes me shudder to think that people would invest that kind of time and money into a totally ostentatious Christmas display when there are people like Fatuma in our world. Some Christmas decoration is fine, but that? I certainly wouldn't want to live across the street from so much technopop and so many flashing lights. My neighbours and I would vote the guy off the island!

The thing about Christmas decoration is that so much of it is needless use of our planet's limited resources, and a lot of it will just end up in the landfill over time. Tinsel, broken baubles and shorting strings of lights aren't easily recyclable (though our reuse/recycling facilities here in Edmonton are second to none), so it's better to avoid an excess of shiny, once-a-year trinkets to start with. What will the family of the guy who did up the Amazing Grace display do with all that stuff when he dies? The cost of his electricity alone must be astronomical... and unless his kids follow in his footsteps, I doubt they'll want to deal with the thousands of lights left to them in his will.

At our house, decoration is kept to a definite dull roar. We have a white silhouette window display of the Holy Family and a string of LED lights as our visible outside decoration. Indoors, I hang Christmas cards that arrive in the mail around our dining room doorways, and our Advent wreath (with small branches cut from the cedar outside our front door) is our table centrepiece. We buy one tree (carbon neutral -- it has produced oxygen for the planet up until it was cut, and the city grinds it up for mulch in January) -- artificial trees use up a lot of carbon in their manufacturing process and they take forever to biodegrade (but if you have one, don't switch now!) We decorate with the same ornaments year after year, special things that the kids have made at school or friends have given to us. Our tree isn't trendy teal streamers with gilded golden glamour a la Martha Stewart or Debbie Travis, but it is pretty enough.

Enough. That word again. How much is enough decoration? Is it necessary to buy new Christmas stuff every year? Where will it all end up? If we really need to decorate, can we do more with the natural, organic items around us?

I'll end this moodling with an idea I'm trying this year for the first time: a German friend of mine once told me that on St. Barbara's feast day, December 4th, it was tradition for peasants to cut a few branches from any fruit trees in their area. They would bring them into their homes and put them in water, and by December 25th, the blossoms would fill their homes with beauty and fragrance to mark Jesus' birth.

I'll bet Fatuma from Kenya would approve.

Have a happy feast day tomorrow, Auntie Barbara!