Seasonal Needs

It’s only mid-November and we are seriously into decorating the house for Christmas. Most years that doesn’t happen until just after Thanksgiving, which is the traditional starting gun for the holiday season. I could give you lots of reasons why we have started to do all this sooner this year. Both Kim and I find ourselves having just finished big projects (hers a vocal concert and mine a series of expert witness testimonies), and the weather has suddenly gotten cooler. But the biggest reason of all is that Kim especially needs a soulful distraction to keep her from thinking too much about what harshness, cruelty and possibly chaos that seems to be just around the corner for us all as the Trump administration prepares for its assault on our government and, by extension, our way of life. The truth is that we of our generation have had it pretty easy since the end of the Vietnam War and the cultural calming that our generation went through starting in the 70’s. Neither Kim nor I were particular firebrands in our youth, so we can’t really say we were out on the activist marches at that time. We were far more bystanders who were old enough to see and understand it, but young enough to be able to claim that we didn’t have a rightful need to engage in its protests. In many ways, we are more engaged psychologically now than we were then, mostly because we have more leisure time and thus, fewer natural life distractions to force us to go about our business despite the goings on in the world. I don’t think either of us is up for active participation at this stage, but we are as morally indignant as anyone and thus need to manufacture distractions for ourselves wherever we can find them. And it just so happens that we both enjoy the holiday season, so why not push that season.

We are fairly well organized in our decorating approach though we do adjust it every year a bit here and a bit there. Last year I put up hanging lights around the driveway shadesail for a November cast party for Kim’s vocal group. I decided that they looked festive and holiday-like, so I kept them up as part of our outdoor decoration. I have put them up again this year for the same reasons. We, like many Americans, buy these big plastic bins for storing anything we want to keep and use only every once in a while. They go into the garage and utility rooms and keep everything within handy reach when their next use rolls around. We must have a dozen Christmas bins, most of which Kim manages, but I have a few with outdoor decorations and lighting. It’s a process, but a reasonably handy one to pack up non-seasonal items (something that needs an annual triage anyway) and put them into the bins being emptied of holiday decorations. We always seem to have holiday gatherings here, so these decorations never seem to go to waste. We certainly enjoy them, but we find visitors do as well.

For several years, Kim has collected a veritable forrest of small (8” to 15”) Christmas trees of varying texture, material and color, and puts them on the living room piano in lieu of the menagerie of family photos that usually reside thereon. It creates a very festive look. For five years now, we have opted for a Christmas tree that we feel suits our new surroundings. It is a four-foot Mexican tin-smithed tree with colorful beads that shine through a light source from within. It sits on our round occasional table where our oval shell lamp usually lives and lights our living room during most of the year. That table has a glittery silver skirt that matches the tin tree very nicely and thus causes it all to stand about seven feet. It sits in the middle of the living room windows that look our onto our lovely western sunsets towards the ocean. It makes a statement, but the large size of our room makes it seem less than sufficient. We (I should say Jeff and Lisa when we used to hire them to manage our house in absentia) used to hang garland above that for the length of the window-wall, but that is way too much trouble and involves ladders, so we forego that these days. But we felt we needed something more.

Kim found a nice West Elm way to handle the problem. We made a foray to West Elm on Saturday and now our little tin tree has company. We have added a bevy of glittery, folded and fanned heavy paper trees that stand anywhere from three to seven feet in height, half in holiday green and half in natural beige. They assemble in parts from thick flat pads, but combine into majestic trees when set up. We have two seven-footers, two four-footers and one three-footer just to keep the old Feng Shui working for us. This forrest of trees with the Mexican tin-smithed tree at the center make for an impressive holiday display on that whole side of the room that looks out over hills, mountains and ocean. It strangely balances the piano forrest that lives across the room from it. I just hope the heavy paper holds up when we dismantle the holiday decorations since these were not cheap one-time adornments and I am counting on them bringing us holiday cheers for at least a few years.

Along with the holiday pillows on the chairs and sofas and some smaller decorations at either end of the room, including a hanging tree-shaped holiday card display (assuming anyone sends us any cards this year), we have several other seasonal displays around the living room. Less may be more in some design circles, but this is serious holiday therapeutics and I see no benefit to limiting Kim’s or my holiday distraction spirit. I have unboxed seven sets of mini-light strings that are battery operated. These were all from last year so with a battery replacement they should be good to go for this season. Four of the sets have the timing function that lets them be programmed to stay on for 6 hours each day and then off for 18 hours. What a marvel of modern technology in such an inexpensive little thing, right? Two of those sets are wound around my bronze “Quicksand” Jerry Anderson statue of the cowboy and Indian helping one another. That symbol of goodness is a year-round sentiment I display, but seems especially important to highlight at the holidays. Two more will go on the reset sofa table where my California Mission display normally sits. I will then place the three non-timer sets of mini-lights on the etagere with all my antiquities. Those will likely only get play during holiday week since they require remembering to turn them on and off (how antiquated!).

The room will soon be ready for the next 50 or so days of the holiday season. I know that the decorating process is helping us get our minds to a better place, and I’m sure that we will find ways and means to be merry during the holidays with the presence of friends and family. The big question lingering out in the new year future is how we will feel during the normal holiday postpartum when the holidays are behind us and the prospects for the new year loom ahead with undoubted trepidation…and I was doing so well there for a few minutes….