With the holidays fast approaching and our December Ask-A-Wench blog upon us this week, we Wenches asked ourselves: Is there a holiday decoration that you treasure, something you bring out every year, perhaps something that represents family and fond memories or has another special meaning for you? Read on to find out what, for us, adds very special magic to this already magical season -- and scroll down to the comment section to tell us about something special that brightens your holiday!
Pat: We’ve been collecting ornaments for decades. We’ve passed on quite a few to the kids and left a few behind when we moved, but our very first ornaments always travel with us. We were extremely poor when we had our first Christmas tree, but we had a new baby and wanted to start our own traditions. So rather than buy fancy cartons of glittery balls we couldn’t afford, we bought ornament kits and made our own. Then we added popcorn strings and cookies that no infant could resist! The plaster ones are losing their glitter and fading with the years, but the wooden ones have really held up. I still like the idea of a homemade holiday, so a few of these go on the tree every year with all the others we’ve collected.
Andrea: I have a very special memento from childhood Christmases that I take out every year. It’s a little lamb from the vintage family crèche that my Swiss grandmother handed down to my mother. The stable—a lovely little structure built of twigs and thatch—and most of the other figurines are now with my older brother, but my younger brother and I each got to have a piece of family history. The nicks, the wobbles, the threadbare wool of my lamb all make me smile as I think back to those holidays of the past. One in particular really stands out. We would always make a big deal of setting up the creche when grandmother would arrive for Christmas. Out came the box, with all the figurines carefully wrapped in tissue paper from the previous year and we set arranging the shepherds, the animals in the stable, Joseph and Mary . . . and to everyone’s horror we came to the end of unpacking and Baby Jesus was nowhere to be found! Now, had a cow or donkey gone missing, we probably could have overlooked it, but this was BAD!
My mother could see that my grandmother was a bit rattled. Being artistic, she an Idea. Without telling any of us, she went downstairs to her art studio and found a block of beeswax in her bookbinding supplies. (The human figures were all molded of plaster, wax and cloth.) Taking up an X-acto knife, she set to work and carved a tiny sleeping baby, found a scrap of white silk for swaddling cloth, and returned upstairs, where she carefully laid him in the manger. My grandmother was elated! Christmas could now officially continue! Needless to say, my mother’s handcarved Baby Jesus became part of family legend. (Suspicions had fallen on my younger brother, who was usually to blame when mischief happened. But he swears to this day that he had nothing to do with the disappearance!)
Christina: I have several boxes of Christmas decorations that I bring out every year and most of the things in there are special in some way. What I treasure the most, however, are the Christmas table cloths, runners and doilies, which have all been lovingly made by various members of my family. There’s a table runner made by my grandmother, a magnificent poinsettia cross-stitch by my mother, small doilies given to me by my favourite aunts, one from my daughter, and even a table cloth I made myself. These all took hours of painstaking work and make me feel close to them during the festive season, especially those who are no longer with us.
My absolute favourite is the little doily with camels – they are just adorable! It was sewn by my great-aunt Elly, a spinster lady who basically spent most of her life doing handicrafts. She used to spend Christmas with us, and looking at this item brings back so many wonderful memories of Christmases past. We had huge gatherings with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, and it was such fun! I have lots of pieces of Elly’s exquisite work but this tiny little thing appeals to me like nothing else. I have used it every Christmas since I was given it and I will never part with it.
I’m currently working on a replica in different colours, but it won’t be as lovely as the original. Maybe it will remind one of my descendants of me though – who knows?
Anne here. Sadly my vintage family ornaments were stolen from my parents' house some years ago. But I always enjoy the ritual of getting out the boxes containing my own Christmas decorations and arranging them around the house. It's so hard to pick a favourite. But then my iPhone refused to send me the photos I took for this post, so I'm left with old photos, mostly of ornaments I've made myself. I went through a stage of making them out of paper and card, and all of them in this photo are paper, except the holly wreath, which is polyclay. I sometimes make 'dangles' to give to others -- strings of crystals and other beads to hand on a tree and catch the light. And I did a course making ornaments (and earrings) from porcelain.
But like other wenches, the ornaments that are most dear to me have stories and memories attached to them. There's a little bouzouki from a young Greek girl who was sent out to attend school in Australia and improve her English. She was a little bit lost at first and I took her under my wing, and when the year was up, she returned to Greece and sent me a lovely letter and this little bouzouki ornament. There's an unvarnished wooden silhouette ornament from when I was a backpacker in Switzerland in the lead-up to Christmas, and watched a woman in a craft market cutting it by hand with a simple hand-held jigsaw. We got talking and when she'd finished, I bought it.
Some of my ornaments are from friends, others I made and the rest I bought. I think that's the thing about Christmas ornaments — I'm not a fan of the idea of 'curating' the tree in the latest Christmas style. My tree will always be a mish-mash of styles and materials, and a gorgeous personal collection of memories and stories.
Mary Jo: The history of this splendid clock is a little vague. It came from my mother who got it from her mother. I'm not sure how it ended up in my house but I think my sister ordered it. <G> She says the clock is French. My mother told her it was Napoleonic. My best guess that it's Second Empire, which is when Napoleon III, the Napoleon's nephew, ruled France, 1852-1870. The style looks right. I have a very vague memory that my grandmother might have acquired it in Vienna, which is where she was living when she met my grandfather. (Two Americans abroad! Romantic.)
The Christmas connection is because it sat on the mantelpiece above our fireplace, and it had three feet. Three kids in the family, so on Christmas Eve, stockings were hung, one per clock foot, and the contents were our first Christmas excitement. The three of us would wake up in the middle of the night and were allowed to harvest the stockings and take them upstairs where we'd spread out our loot on my sister's bed and we'd squeal a lot. I have memories of my mother calling up to us to get back to sleep! Which we didn't, but many fond memories were forged on those night. <G>
Joanna: These crèche figures are from when I was a kid. A dozen or so plaster figures, painted, probably made in the 1940s. Not valuable ever. Multiply mended.
I’ve got the central players spread out along the mantlepiece here. The actual crèche scene doesn’t get set up till Christmas Eve. The wise men will soon be spread out around the room, perched in bookcases, travelling, because they don’t get to Bethlehem till Epiphany. Over the years the crèche has accumulated all kinds of animals, some of them oddly small or large.
Front and center, among chickens and ducks, is a hedgehog. No nativity is complete without a hedgehog. Behind the hedgehog there's a little carved dog. Then there’s a pair of cats hugging each other. They are not terribly cat-like cats, but they're the only cats I have and I like cats. I think the turquoise goose contorted up in the back came home with my father from China in WWII but maybe not.When the manger gets set up, the guy with the basket of eggs, (what is a chicken keeper called? A chickherd?) and the shepherd with his five or six sheep (you can't see him because he's out of the picture to the left) will be closer to the manger than the Three Kings because we're very egalitarian in our crèche.
Susan: When I was a kid, I loved the miniature Christmas tree that one of my grandmothers always set out on her baby-grand piano in December, and now I have it in my own home. Handmade in the 1920s of wood and tinsel and foil, it's covered in tinsel spirals and tin and foil ornaments, with tiny painted presents under the tree. It's fragile and a bit shabby now, but still glittery and beautiful, and holds wonderful memories of my grandmother, who would play the piano while my sisters and I silly-danced around her living room (as a teenager, she played piano for the silent movies and knew lots of great tunes!). I bring it out every December, and in January, carefully wrap it up again. One day I hope to pass it along to my little granddaughter (who has my grandmother's piano in her house now!).
And when my husband and I were first married, a very special wedding gift was a big box of Christmas ornaments handmade by a friend of my parents--and we still put them on the tree every year. Here are two favorites on this year's tree--a tiny angel set against gold foil that reflects the light, and another with tiny figures of Joseph and Mary--in a hot-air balloon! (One of my kids, when little, was surprised to learn that Baby Jesus was born in a stable instead of a hot-air balloon.)
Whatever holiday you celebrate at this time of year, do you have a holiday treasure that holds special meaning? We'd love to hear about it!
Happy Holidays to all from the Wenches! Visit the blog often in December and January - we'll be posting each day from Christmas Eve to Ephiphany to celebrate the Yuletide as we leave 2020 behind and welcome 2021!