Christmas Goodbyes—1994

Tonight I took the ornaments off the tree. Each one holds for me a memory of Christmas in New England. I marvel at how different this tree is from the one I grew up with in the Midwest. The ornaments of my youth were all shiny bulbs, nondescript and lacking in nostalgic meaning—boxes bought at the local department store in sets of twelve. If one fell to the floor smashing into shimmering splinters of glass, the only mourning was the cost of replacing it.

As I sort through the handmade treasures of today's tree—none made with any great expense but priceless just the same—I find myself face-to-face with a reality. Occasionally I must discard one and I do so with great sorrow. This year I must lay to rest a Mr. and Mrs. Claus I made in Andover, Massachusetts, during the first year of my marriage. We were living on the campus of Phillips Academy where my husband was a teacher in the fine arts program. I was inspired by the creativity that surrounded me and wanted to make an artistic contribution to the holidays.

Mr. and Mrs. Claus are soft-sculpture heads. They were made with two bits of an old piece of nylon stocking. I stuffed each piece with quilting material, and then, using a threaded needle, coaxed up small bulbous portions of the nylon and stuffing from under the surface to create facial features. I then used old scraps of cloth, one of red velvet, to make caps for their heads. Mr. and Mrs. Claus are wise in their expressions as if they know the true meaning of Christmas. So ugly they are charming; it is clear they will not impart their secrets to even the most patient—their mouths are sewn securely shut.

Fourteen years later we now live at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut. The nylon I used to form the heads of the Claus duo has run, the stuffing has come out, and their caps have flattened so severely over the years that the only kind thing to do is to perform a sort of euthanasia. I’ve known this day would come. For several years now as I unpacked them and then packed them up again, I saw their spirits diminish by degrees. Nevertheless, I am sad and can’t quite comfort myself with the rationale that I can make new ones. The new ones will never be the same. They won’t hold for me the same naiveté or freshness they had when I tenderly placed them on the tree my husband and I put up for our first Christmas.

Companion pieces still survive—soft sculpture candy canes, wreaths, and holly leaves—made from patterns out of a women’s magazine I thought I was finally grown-up enough for—one I am now too grown up for. But it is Mr. and Mrs. Claus who will live on in my memory because they were made by my own two hands without a pattern or any instruction in how to make them.

Our tree has many new additions this year, ornaments my son made at day care, his four-year-old hands struggling to make them just right, his pride bursting like a firecracker. My daughter, more sophisticated in her eight-year-old wisdom, made what will be a favorite in years to come—a real sugar cone with a fluff of white polyester stuffing and colored paper “jimmies” glued on. I carefully wrap these wonders up tonight hoping to preserve them for Christmases to come. I know the day will arrive when these, too, will need a final resting place and won’t be on our tree or stored in a box, but safely tucked away with my memories of Mr. and Mrs. Claus.

Author’s note—This story is now 16 years old and so many other handmade ornaments have had to be discarded, it’s hard to remember them all except for what can be seen in the photographs of Christmas trees throughout the years. Do you have a favorite memory of an ornament? Or an ornament of special significance you continue to place on your tree each year? Please share by posting a comment.

copyright © 1994 DJ Anderson

What Are The Six Most Dangerous Words?

While working on an important publication for a New England boarding school, the six most dangerous words came spilling out of my mouth and then in what seemed like a torrent of incidents, started biting me in the ass, making me wish I had never uttered them in the first place. What were those words? “All you have to do is . . .”

I was in a meeting where, along with my esteemed colleagues, we were making the final decision about photos just prior to the piece going to the printer. There was an extraordinary debate going on about whether to use a particular photo or not. The student in the photo was the son of one of our biggest donors—a trustee of the iconic class—but the boy had recently gotten into some trouble, so the development office was in a quandary about whether that photo should be used or not. Finally, in order to wrap up the meeting, I said, “Let’s just run with this photo for now. If the kid gets into more hot water before the piece is actually on the press, all we have to do is drop in a new photo.”

Happily, everyone agreed to this interim solution. In the end we never had to make a photo substitution but my cavalier and dismissive “all we have to do is” solution came back to bite me, and bite me, and bite me until I felt like I’d explode by ordering one of my colleagues to, “Bite me!” It was several months later when at the critical point in production of another piece was at hand, the director turned to me looking for approval when he confidently said, “Well, we don’t have to decide now, all we have to do is drop the correction in before it goes on press.” What had I done? Pretty soon and even years later, every point of decision seemed to be inescapably avoided by waving the magic wand of indecisiveness and declaring with those now irritating words, “All you have to do is . . . fill in the blank.”

With each use of the phrase I began to realize that I hadn’t started this phenomenal dilution of complicated problems. That, in fact, the phrase had been used for decades, maybe centuries in an attempt to diminish and dismiss complex problems. In some cases, the phrase was used to discredit the people who were seemingly dragging their feet in solving a problem with multiple components. When a colleague of mine was particularly frustrated with the headmaster’s assistant, she said with as much contempt as she could muster, “What’s taking her so long on this project? All she has to do is answer the phone over there.” With the efficiency of white out, my colleague completely dismissed the fact that the headmaster’s assistant did much more than answer the phone. After all, the very reason for the complaint was because she was running late on a very complicated project for us.

Illustrative of my point, my husband and I were visiting my very Republican parents in Florida several years ago. My pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mother was watching Rush Limbaugh on television. At the time, my husband and I had no notion of who he was and so as he spoke, we both started to smirk and even giggle. My mother kept shooting us “behave yourselves” looks but we just got more tickled than ever. “All you have to do is have these welfare mothers get jobs and get working!” he railed. “All you have to do is increase oil production in Alaska and become an independent oil-producing nation!” “All you have to do is arrest all the drug lords to have a drug-free America!” It was too much. Who was this fantastic stand-up comedian? And why was my mother watching him but not laughing?

Mom was pretty furious with us for thinking her favorite political pundit was a stand-up comedian but it was then that I realized that any sentence that began, “All you have to do is . . .” was sure to be referring to very complex and, in some cases, unsolvable issues. Therefore, they forever more became what I refer to as “the six most dangerous words.”

As I continued to contemplate how often I heard “All you have to do is . . .” I began to think about the stories of my life and the stories of people whose lives have somehow been woven into the fabric of mine. How often have the complexities of a human life been distilled into a simple catch phrase in order to explain it all? “Well, her father was a terrible drunk, you know,” to explain why a daughter never could hold a job. “Oh didn’t you know? His parents divorced when he was eight years old,” to explain why a young man was not interested in women.

My goal, in writing, is to juxtapose the absurdity of trying to dilute each story into a “category,” to the web of intricate emotional decisions that actually lead to the outcome. Some of my stories are non-fiction, character studies of real people, using their real names . . . in many ways, these are tributes. Some of my stories are thinly disguised as fiction. To those who know me best, it won't be hard to make the connections back to the non-fictionalized circumstances that gave rise to these accounts. The reason I have fictionalized them are numerous, but the top two are to  preserve the anonymity of the characters among those who really have no idea where I got the story in the first place, and to protect myself. One of the things I've learned about writing non-fiction from my memory is that my memory is sometimes not very reliable, and I don't want to be held accountable for details that I've filled in for the sake of the storytelling. As a colleague's father used to say, “Don't let facts interfere with the telling of a good story.” Finally, some of my stories are a complete fabrication coming entirely from my imagination. Regarding the second two types of stories, I will not identify for my audience which is which. In the case of non-fiction character studies, I will definitely identify those as such. I might throw in a poem here and there as I have written a few I'm particularly happy with.

I hope you'll enjoy “The Six Most Dangerous Words” and will come back to visit often.

copyright © 2010 DJ Anderson