I am taking down my Christmas tree, two days after 12th Night, on the 8th day of January, and I am thinking of my mother, who was the creator of Christmas celebrations in my family when I was growing up.
She was the first generation American in her family, with both parents immigrating from Sweden, and she brought to her marriage all the Swedish traditions of Yuletide celebrations—- evergreens and a fir tree in the house, packages wrapped in white and tied with red ribbon, a Yulbord on Christmas Eve.
When my mother was growing up, there were journeys by a horse-drawn sleigh across the snow-covered fields to midnight services on Christmas Eve at the little Lutheran church in central Minnesota. Santa arrived at their home to the tune of sleigh bells. Family gathered on Christmas Eve, and extended family gathered for Second Day of Christmas.
My father came from an English/Scots-Irish family in Arkansas, and I don’t think his mother made much fuss over Christmas at all.
But my mother did, and she inculcated her four children with the rituals of a Swedish Christmas, though we never celebrated St. Lucia’s Day. We carried my mother’s traditions forward into our own families when we married.
All the ornaments now are off my tree, including the very old glass ornaments stored in a box labeled in my mother’s hand-writing, For Bill and Kristin. Now I am struggling with untangling the six strands of white lights from the tree, which has dried out terribly. It stopped taking up water at some point.
My lower back is hurting. I have to sit down for a bit. I am 81 years old, three years younger than my mother who died on this day, January 8th, 1992, thirty-two years ago. I was at the hospital when she died. My sister and my two children were were there, too. It was a bright sunny January day.
The last strands of lights are off the tree, and I spread a sheet on the living room floor, press my foot on the lever of the German made tree stand, and gently lift and lower the dried out tree to the sheet.
I haul the awkward tree bundle out of the living room, squeezing past furniture, and out the kitchen door, thinking of my mother on this anniversary of her death.
Not long ago, I read that a person’s life span is not measured by the actual number of years lived, but by the ripples they created during their lives.
If I look at the ripples my mother created with her Christmas rituals alone, those ripples will go on for a very long time.
My older brother had two children, and they have four children total. I have two children, and they have three children total. My sister has two children and one of those sons has four children. Even if only small pieces of my mother’s traditions are carried forward, there are eleven in the newest generation to be the bearers.
I drop the tree bundle on the kitchen patio. It now is almost dark. Tomorrow I will put the tree up in a corner of the yard, to be a winter shelter for the little birds.
I look up at the dark sky, and turn back to the house. Lots of clean up still to do.
January 8, 2024
Kristin Moyer