Winter Hours

I don’t think I am old yet,
or done with growing.
But my perspective has altered —
I am less hungry
for the busyness of the body,
more interested in the tricks of the mind.

by Mary Oliver

On a recent chilly Sunday afternoon in early January, my husband and I rendezvoused in the living room to take down the Christmas tree. The holiday was over. We were ready to say goodbye to the old year and move ahead into 2023. Before he worked on the lights and the logistics of getting the tree outside and into its accustomed snowbank, I removed the decorations.

Over the years, with our daughters well-settled in their own homes and leaving me to do the whole process by myself, it has become a joyous task. I’ve slowed it down, turned it into a kind of meditation.

Being me, I had a system for how it should work: I took ornaments from the tree branches one by one, placed them carefully on the nearby dining room table in an orderly fashion (some had their exact right boxes to fit into), and then methodically set about the packing. The handmade silvery leaves fashioned by a local craftsman had their flat box. The fragile glass Santa had a larger, stronger container. For each, I paused to remember the friends who had given them to us and the delight they have brought.

But as time passed and I touched a few of the oldest among them, I tipped to the edge of nostalgia. They took me, in momentary mental flashes, to other places, other times. To trees they had hung on in other houses, to hands that had long-ago caressed them—or made them—in other lifetimes. And even, for one, to the ancient history of the Knuth family, my Midwestern ancestors.

First, the quilted fruits caught my eye. Even though my husband and I always returned to Iowa for the holidays in our first years of marriage, we still put up a small tree in our graduate school apartment in Manhattan. We had little money, but I had a sewing machine and there was a fabric store down the street. I selected material that had tiny prints for texture and made quilted pears, apples, and oranges. With yarn for hangers, a few of these historic treasures adorned our Vermont tree again this year. Removing them on Sunday, I spent another few minutes in that New York apartment.

And then the needlepointed ornaments. When both of our daughters had been born and our family were residents of a church parsonage in Westchester County in New York (my husband spent a number of years as a parish minister), my dear Aunt Harriet offered decorations for our tree there. Four of them, handmade artifacts featuring each of our names. On all, the background stitching is green and the names are in red and white. “Lib,” “David,” and “Mary” are done perfectly, but for our daughter Susan, called Suze, the “Z” on her needlepointed ornament is backwards. Odd, we’ve always thought. But the very oddness of Susan’s needlepointed square has led to a shared memory of our time in that house, when our children were babies. And even more important, it is an ongoing connection to Aunt Harriet.

Also on the table waiting to be packed away was the round ball of glued strips of paper containing quotations from Shakespeare, made by my college friend Sue. She and I were fellow English majors, so her gift was a meaningful reminder of our bond. By now, though, the ornament makes me sad, as Sue declines into dementia; I’m glad to flash back for just a moment to Sue as she used to be.

A happier memory lies in the elegant red nutcracker we brought back from our years of living in London. He is not an ornament but a wooden-soldier with a red jacket and a tall hat. This year he stood on a small table in the front hall, to greet arriving guests and the paper deliverer each morning of the holiday.

But the best, and oldest? The Knuth family’s “Weihnachtsmann,” our 10-inch tall version of Father Christmas. The lore passed along from my father is that our Weihnachtsmann came to Iowa with his father, from Flensburg, in northern Germany, when he immigrated to Iowa in the 1880s. Dressed in a long, white coat and carrying a load of sticks in his arms, he sat on the branches of every Christmas tree of my dad’s life. And once I inherited him, he sat on a number of our trees too. But as he grew ever more fragile over the years, I placed him into an elegant shadowbox. His white coat and hood are now colorfully set off by a warm, red background. And today, even though he’s still Father Christmas, he has a permanent place of honor year-round in our living room.

No amount of research I’ve done has turned up anything like him, or any information on him. His folk origins in Germany remain a mystery. Even so, every Christmas, I look at him, share the little I know about him with others, and have imaginary conversations with him. Through him, I recall another connection to a past that matters.

Like Mary Oliver, I consider myself not old, not done with growing. But also, like Oliver, I am a woman with an altered perspective. One that, as she suggests, is more interested in the “tricks of the mind” on a Sunday afternoon in January 2023.

Mary K. Otto, formerly of Norwich, lives in Shelburne, Vt. Readers may email her at maryotto13@gmail.com.

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