Ah, holiday nostalgia! In my family of origin, in the 1960’s, the finishing touch to decorating the Christmas tree was always the hanging of the silver tinsel icicles. As children, we were instructed to gently place one or two icicles at a time on a branch to prevent unsightly clumping. It taught us patience and diligence, but of course we really just wanted to throw them on the tree. We were obedient children, though, and perfected the precise tinsel draping skills required by our parents. The icicles had to be removed with the same care because we recycled them year after year. I recently learned that these beloved silver icicles were actually deadly. Made of lead, the FDA halted their importation and leaned on domestic manufacturers to stop producing them in the early 1970’s.
Our first Christmas together, my husband, Harvey, and I illegally chopped down a Charlie Brown tree from a nearby patch of forest and decorated it with a homemade popcorn and cranberry garland. It screamed of newlyweds with no money, but I missed the sparkle of those silver icicles. That same Christmas, we received a present packaged in a gift bag, surrounded by loads of shredded gold Mylar. This was it! We would create our own Christmas tree decorating tradition with this new golden tinsel! Only, because he hadn’t grown up with silver icicles, Harvey wanted to throw them on the tree. Once I taught him the proper technique of icicle placement, he reluctantly followed my directions.
Once our children started to help decorate the tree, you can imagine how they approached the gold icicles. I carefully instructed them in the fine art of placing each one just so, but they always ended up throwing fistfuls of them at the tree. I caught Harvey doing it once or twice too, but I would always surreptitiously rearrange the messy wads of icicles.
This was the only holiday drama that our little family of four ever experienced.
Until.
Harvey was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at the age of fifty, and that idyllic family life morphed overnight into a new way of living. We learned to live one moment at a time, in the ever-shifting landscape that was dementia.
Four years into his diagnosis, Harvey was quite childlike. At times, I could put aside my orderly nature and just lean into that sense of wonder and play with him, instead of dwelling on the loss of the quiet, reflective Harvey of the past. We were more playmates than life-mates by that point.
About this time, one weekend after Thanksgiving, we had three long-time friends visit us from out of town. They suggested we decorate for Christmas even though it was earlier in the season than our family normally decorated. I was reluctant at first to alter our traditions, but I pulled out all the decorations from the attic anyway, tossing my need to control.
We all had a blast. We shopped for a live tree and a wreath, and our friends used our family’s decorations in new and creative ways to festoon our home. Although it went against my inclination to direct them on how place the items in my traditional settings, I allowed them to play on their own.
And you know what’s coming next! Yes, with Burl Ives singing “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in the background, we all flung that gold tinsel with joy and abandon at the tree!
The last two years of Harvey’s life were excruciating for our little family. He spent four weeks in a psychiatric ward over his second to last Christmas and New Year’s. My children and I coped by continuing our most sacred holiday traditions: decorating the tree with the gold tinsel, Christmas Eve service at our church, early Christmas morning stockings and gifts, our traditional brunch menu, then larger family dinners with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. And an added visit to Harvey in the psychiatric ward.
Now that he’s gone, the magic of the gold icicles can summon Harvey back for a moment. After throwing them on the tree, I now bask in the reflected glow of the Christmas tree lights twinkling playfully among the clumps of golden icicles.
2 Responses
I love this story.
Thank you, Jo!