Christmas Ornaments -- Share your favorites

Most families who celebrate Christmas have a veritable smorgasbord of ornaments. Mine is no exception. Heirloom ornaments handed down for generations. Ornaments given to me when I was a child. Ornaments that are wacky and fun. Ornaments bought to match a particular decor. Almost all of them have a story. I thought I'd share a few of my favorite this Christmas season.

And, I'd like to invite you to do the same! Share a story (and a link, if you'd like) about one of your favorite holiday ornaments... whatever holiday you celebrate and cherish.

These two ornaments are years apart in time, distance, and style, but they do share a certain kitsch factor.

The little tree made of wrapped boxes stands about a foot high. It's from the 1950s and belonged to my Great Aunt Fern. It reminds me of photos of her from that era, when she favored cat's eye glasses with rhinestones, and dresses with nipped waists and swingy skirts.

The other ornament is so deliberately bizarre it makes me laugh. An alligator (or crocodile?) in red high heels is charming enough, but the Christmas trees on his back put him quite over the top.


A couple of years ago, when I was in Vienna for a semester, I bought several of these weird little designs at one of the Christmas markets. The irony is that these ornaments are made in America, so I traveled all the way to Vienna only to bring them back to the U.S. (I wish I could remember the name of the company that makes them. If anyone recognizes them, let me know!)

I spent a few months alone in Vienna. At Christmas, Frink was going to join me. It's a rather lonely feeling wandering by yourself around a city festively decorated for Christmas, especially Vienna, which must have the most beautiful Christmas in the world. The markets are thronged with people standing under sparkling lights in the streets or at outdoor stalls, laughing, eating delicious cookies, hot potatoes, sausages, and mulled wines.

After Frink joined me for Christmas, we planned to stay in Vienna only a few days, before doing some traveling, so I didn't want to get a tree. But my little apartment seemed so bare and sad. So, I bought some pine boughs at a flower shop, stuck them in a large vase on a table, draped it with a "skirt" and hung 10 or 12 ornaments from it. I got most of the ornaments at Christmas Markets to give as gifts when I returned home, but I didn't think my friends and family would mind if I hung them for a few days on my makeshift tree.

This well-heeled alligator had a prominent spot, and I grew so attached to him that I had to keep him.


Tomorrow: More on Vienna's Christmas markets, and some ornaments acquired there.
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Help Needed Decoding Scarf

This fascinating and mysterious silk scarf tells a story in pictures, each of the 36 blocks depicting a different scene. The scarf reminds me of my books narrated through wood prints. It presents the same kind of reading challenge, trying to figure out the story it tells. Unlike the wood prints, it has words, but I can't even identify what language they are written in, much less read them. It looks something like Arabic, but for some reason I don't think it is. I don't even know where the scarf is from. It belonged to my Aunt Fern, who might have bought it in Ethiopia, where she lived in the 60's, or in Egypt (given the pyramids in some of the scenes.)

I'm not sure what direction it should be read from. There is, however, a clue early on in the story, where a letter is given to a messenger, who in subsequent panels gets in a boat and hands the letter to a priest. Based on this, I photographed the 36 panels in groups of 3 from left to right and from top to bottom.

The story is obviously religious, probably Biblical. It starts with two men (or a man and a woman), one carrying a child, the other a sacrificial lamb or goat that he feeds to some kind of monster or spirit. A crowd gathers, including several kings or priests. They have a celebration with music and drinks, culminating in what looks like a canonization or ordination (judging from the cross on the crown.) Two richly robed men travel in a boat past the pyramids. They are given a letter by some priests (?) and return to their boat, which travels past the same two pyramids. The letter is passed on to two priests, one of whom has a Star of David on his robe. A whole crowd gets in the boat and journeys past the pyramids, where they attend a big feast. We see still more priests, a figure that might be the Madonna and child, a lion, camels, what looks like a game of hockey (!) and perhaps a dead body. What it all means is a mystery to me.

In hopes that some of you can assist in interpreting the story, or identify the language or religious tradition it depicts, I'm posting it here. (If you want a closer look, right click on the photos to open them in a new tab, or just click on them then hit the back arrow to return. I haven't figured out how to make pictures open in a separate window.)

And even if you can't read it, I hope you enjoy its charm nonetheless!












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Postcards from 1944 New Orleans

(Click on the photos for a larger view. Click the back arrow to return.)

"My Dear," my uncle wrote in 1944, "The little man has had a very full day, and is now having his demitasse at Broussard’s, an old restaurant in the French Quarter. Shrimp remoulade, soup, plus a few other items. Friday night I have a reception at Antoines, supposed to be something in the food and atmosphere line. Pretty soft, isn’t it?"

This was the message on one of the 6 postcards my uncle sent from New Orleans. I'm not sure what he was doing there in 1944, but it probably had to do with WWII. The cards, marked with a "Red Cross War Fund" stamp, are addressed to my aunt in Houston. They had moved to Houston from St. Louis because Uncle E. wanted to do work that supported the war effort. This followed a devastating rejection when he tried to join the military, one final insult from a bout of TB he suffered as a young man. I remember my aunt telling me how they had to save all of their gas rationing coupons so they could drive their car from St. Louis to Houston. So, when I read my uncle's comment about the"soft" time he's having, I detect mixed emotions: pleasure at indulging in some hard-to-find luxuries during a time of rationing, mingled with a sense of guilt at not being in the trenches like other men his age.

That's one of the things I love about these cards: the intriguing hints of untold tales. I also love how they reflect my uncle's dry, Noel Cowardish wit, how his voice sparkles and smiles through his brief words. Here's another example:

Darling: This town is not so fun as the articles in Colliers and others would have you think, but undoubtably much more so than in the recent past. Plenty of gambling, but the lid is fairly well on so far as [illegible]. The place fairly abounds in night clubs and joints of every description. Maybe whiskey isn’t flowing freely, but most other kinds of giggle or weeping water are.

Uncle Edmond, I should add, was a teetotaler, having given up alcohol a few years before. Again, while the words are mere ripples, dashed off in a hurry, they offer intriguing hints of a deeper back-story whose details I will never know.

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Hand-painted Cards for the American Lady

After my Great Aunt Fern passed away and I was clearing out her house, I found a bag marked "Keepsake Cards by Segar." It was full of exquisite notecards painted in the early '80s by a Sri Lankan artist who was a friend of my aunt and uncle. I don't know when she and Uncle Edmond met him; they lived in Sri Lanka in the 60's, when he would have been just a boy. Perhaps they knew his parents. Or maybe they met him during a later visit there.

Once, Aunt Fern showed me a magazine cover featuring a cubist painting by this artist, who at that time worked in a bank. That was the sum total of what I knew about him. But, thanks to the internet (which still seems to me as magical as Merlin's book of spells) I found several articles about the artist. In one, I read the following:

"One of the handful of Sri Lankan artists who is able to make a living entirely from his painting....Segar [would] occasionally make greeting cards for his friends, especially for the American lady who complained that the Sri Lankan cards are copied, western-oriented and do not depict Sri Lanka life at all. His hand-painted cards were so popular that he got the idea to have the outline printed and get his friends and family to hand- colour them."

Reading this made me wonder if the "American lady" in the article was my Aunt Fern. It certainly sounds like something she would say. I can picture her blue eyes twinkling behind cats-eye glasses as she floated out her complaint in that direct, disarmingly gracious Southern drawl. In any case, here are a few charming early works by this internationally known artist. (Click on them for a larger view. The colors of the originals are brighter.) Read more!

Angry Fox, Happy Monkeys

A short post today...no long essays of loss or longing. Instead, a couple of wonderful, whimsical works of art. I don't know much about them...I inherited them from my Great Aunt and Uncle, who traveled the world in the '50s and '60s. (If you can shed any light on the artists, I would be grateful! But in any case, I hope they bring a smile to your face, too!)

I call this charcoal painting "Monkey Joy." The label on the back reads "Lanka Framing Works, No. 113. Galle Road, Bambalapitiya." I've never heard of Bambalapitiya, but a quick web search shows that it's on the coast not far from Columbo, Sri Lanka. And Google Maps shows that the shop is (was?) across the street from Holy Family Convent. (As someone who remembers the old days of laboriously doing research in dusty 25-volume encyclopedias, it is nothing short of magic that I can be sitting here in the Midwest, see a label on the back of a picture, and 30 seconds later be looking at a satellite photo of that precise location half a world away!)



I love the grumpy expression this fox is sporting, and the simple lines suggesting rocks and bushes. This watercolor on parchment is signed by "Inikumo, who was a Japanese artist who seems to have worked mostly in woodblocks.
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Bamboo and Bhikkus

There is a sway of bamboo in our bedroom. It's not real bamboo, but a shadow grove that will live forever on the Chinese scroll I inherited from my great aunt and uncle. As beautiful as it is, in some ways it is a poor substitute for the real stand of bamboo that used to grace our backyard. Grown from a foot-long cutting shoved into the ground a decade ago, the bamboo spread along the fenceline, sprouting spindly, fishing-rod stalks that eventually grew into poles twenty feet tall and as thick as my arm. Their skin was cool and satiny smooth like birch bark or ginko leaves. The bamboo provided a green curtain between our house and the neighbor's and gave our suburban back yard a wild feeling. The birds loved it, building nests high above the ground among the leaves. In winter, the sleek, segmented columns stayed supple and green, bringing life and color to the yard as they swayed in the breeze. The best days were when the bamboo bowed patiently under the weight of a newly fallen snow. As if posing for a Christmas card, a cardinal would land on a curving stalk, a daub of scarlet bobbing against the white and green background. And in summmer, Frink would cut some of the dead poles and bind them with jute to make spigots for the fountain on the patio.

For many years, our next-door neighbor shared our enthusiasm for the bamboo, allowing it to spread into his yard, creating a small, communal forest. Then he transferred to a new city. The new neighbors were a young couple with an impossibly tidy house. One of the first things they did was chop down all the bamboo on their side of the fence. They renovated their yard, making it as neat and regimented as a forest of office cubicles. Ours was a running type of bamboo -- not the best variety for a suburban neighborhood -- and for several years it sent out reconnaissance squads, hoping to recapture the neighbors' yard. They were not amused. After a couple of years, we sadly realized that the bamboo would have to go.

I was determined that if I had to sacrifice my bamboo, I wanted something in return. So, I decided to squeeze a long-desired pool into our small backyard. The bamboo succumbed to the violence of a back-hoe, and an above-ground pool and deck took its place (see the forthcoming “My Hoosier Pool” for more on that.) There are homages to the bamboo in the fencing that surrounds the pool and in the pathetic cuttings that grow in pots, but I long for the day when I can buy some acreage out West where my bamboo and I can run free.

A year or so after we cut down the bamboo, my great aunt died. She was 97, a Southern steel magnolia and unlikely world traveler. (You’ll be hearing a lot about her and my great uncle in these pages.) One of the things I brought from her house was the scroll that now hangs in our bedroom.

The scroll is a bit older than I once thought. For some reason, I thought my aunt and uncle had purchased it in China in 1981, a trip that was quite an adventure for a couple then in their seventies. But recently I found some old black and white photographs that show the scroll in the background. The pictures must have been taken in Sri Lanka, where they lived in the late 50s and early 60s, when it was still called Ceylon.

The photos illustrate an event my aunt loved to talk about: The Day the Bhikkus Came to Dinner. The bhikkus were young Buddhist monks-in-training. In her soft drawl, Aunt Fern would recount how they came to visit, all serious and meditative in their bright orange robes, under the watchful eye of an older monk. But they were just kids, and at dinner, when one tasted the table sugar, his face lit up with joy. He asked for more, and the stern master chastised him. In her sweet, firm, grandmotherly way, Aunt Fern said that surely a little treat wouldn't hurt just this once. Perhaps not wanting to offend his hosts, the monk nodded his permission. Aunt Fern passed around spoons and soon the sugar bowl was empty.

The photos also show a man man hovering in the background who is probably Paramali, my aunt’s cook in Sri Lanka. He was another favorite topic of Aunt's stories. She and Paramali got off to a rocky start. Aunt Fern took her life-long role as a housewife very seriously, and she and my uncle had a moral objection to servants. But they soon learned that it was expected for westerners, especially those with the U.N., to employ locals. They hired Paramali, who made it clear that the kitchen was his province. But Aunt Fern was intent on learning how to prepare curry and to use the coriander, tumeric, ginger root and array of peppers she found in Paramali's kitchen. He resented her intrusion, but she persevered, and soon she and Paramali became fast friends. But she never could break him of one habit. Paramali was known for whisking dishes away before one was quite finished eating, an action that became known by the verb, "to Paramali." I was excited not only to find this visual confirmation of two oft-heard stories, but to see the Chinese scroll hanging in the background.

Whereever it came from and however old it may be, this two-dimensional black and gray painting captures the essence of bamboo, with all its life, and depth, and sway more accurately than a crisp color photograph ever could. The bamboo stalks don't so much end at the painting's edges as they draw you outward, suggesting more life just beyond the edge of the silk canvas. I can imagine walking past the sparse stalks in the foreground, venturing further and further back until I get lost in the dense grove.

It is a fitting reminder not only of my aunt and uncle and the stories they shared, but of my bamboo groves, both those dead and gone and those that are yet to be. Read more!