Keeping Christmas Tree and Ornament Traditions – or Bust!
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
By Bill Primavera
Of all the holiday seasons my wife Margaret and I enjoyed together, one of the most memorable was the year a decade ago when we moved to our current home in Trump Park in Shrub Oak.
Christmas has always been an important holiday to my wife and me and never did we think that, after so many years of being ensconced in the same home where year after year we used the same corner of the living room with the same decorations on the tree, that we would be moving the week before Christmas to a new location. We wanted to uphold the tradition of having a tree but hadn’t even half unpacked.
However, inveterate holiday revelers that we were, we committed to having a traditional Christmas Eve family celebration with a decorated tree as always, no matter what. As the moving men were unloading boxes from their truck, I spotted that battered six-foot-long oblong box that I’ve retaped many years and retrieved it before it was transported to the storage room of my new condo building.
So, there we were with all our linens still packed in boxes in the front hall and our pots and pans in similar straits on the kitchen floor. But the very first item to be released from the bounds of its cardboard restraints is that faker than fake greenery that somehow springs to life every year with the help of sparkling lights and hand-make ornaments made a half-century ago by eager newlyweds. We obviously had a lot of time on our hands for crafts pursuits.
I dragged the box to the Palladian-like window at the end of our fifth-story great room and plopped it down. I was hardly able to wait until the movers left, like a 10-year-old child eager to open his first gift. I ripped open the box and pulled out the stand with its spindly legs, which I’m always convinced will never hold the tree steadily enough. Then came the bulkier bottom section of greenery, then the diminished third section, followed by the slimmer second and finally the top that brings the tree to a point.
I fluffed out the branches, plugged in the lights and, naturally, another string of them had died over the past year. Margaret had supplied another three sets of 100 each to fill in the dead spaces, but even one of those didn’t work.
A day later the tree was fully bright once again as I tangled the new lights with the old. Then together we started the annual ritual of unwrapping the hand-make ornaments made from Styrofoam balls covered with fancy ribbons, beads, pearls, rhinestones, feathers, buttons and all kinds of ingenious materials we gathered from the hat district (when women still wore hats) in Manhattan. I have no idea what occupies the former hat district today.
Our original plan was to make one elaborate tree ornament each year throughout our marriage, but we got so much into our new hobby when we first married that it became an obsession the very first year. The balls became more and more elaborate as we practiced our skills, with many themed with their own names.
One ball, completely covered in pink ribbon, was named our Baby Girl ball, even though we didn’t have a baby girl yet. There was the Grace Kelly ball with pale blue and yellow ribbons and pearls; the Swan Lake ball with white ribbons, white feathers and crystals; the Can-Can Girl ball with black and red ribbons, beads and a black feather plume on top; and our real piece de resistance, a large Faberge ball with semiprecious gems all over it, taken from old pieces of jewelry.
The tips of our thumbs had developed calluses from pushing in the pins until we got smart and used thimbles to aid our obsession.
We decided it would be safer to buy a large artificial tree so that there would be no threat of sap staining the balls, and we kept producing our little gems until we ran out of space on the tree. We had become addicted to Christmas balls.
The bottom line, however, is that we must have OD’d on our first year’s attempt because we haven’t made a single ball since then. I guess that’s the kind of stuff newly-married couples do together, projects that can be appreciated later in life when there’s time to do so.
And, come what may, including living out of boxes during a downsizing move, we’ve never celebrated a holiday without both appreciating and showing off our collection from that first year of our many years together.
For my Jewish friends, I just found out about a couple who has collected hundreds of dreidels for Hanukkah, so I know my wife and I are not alone in this passion for collections associated with the holidays.
Bill Primavera is a realtor associated with William Raveis Real Estate and founder of Primavera Public Relations, Inc., the longest-running public relations agency in Westchester (www.PrimaveraPR.com), specializing in lifestyles, real estate and development. To engage the services of Bill Primavera and his team to market your home for sale, call 914-522-2076.
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