Merry Christmas!

Day 73: Merry Christmas, dear readers! I know that many of you (more likely, most of you) are finding it difficult to celebrate anything about the last year, so take this moment as I did earlier this morning to reflect on the things which have brought light and love into your lives in years past. As I sat in the sparkle of the lights on my tree, I looked at my ornaments: Tippy and Skunk's kitties; two Fimo sheep represening Cindy and Ivy, first of my former flock; a poorly-carved Carlo, my husband's overly territorial parrot; my mother's Balinese frog; and of course Cocoa, love of my life, represented three times in places of honour among the boughs. Newest to the tree, a slice from a branch with a photo of a certain Crow holding a dear little Pine Siskin on her hand, the ornament a gift from Kevin who, I suspect, will always remember me as a person who lived her motto: "The goal of life is living in agreement with Nature." At least I hope that is how I will be remembered. In this time of reflection, quietly meditating on the significance of many of my ornaments, I found the 2020 frown fading from my forehead, felt a calmness in my spirit which has been absent far too long. I felt a wash of love, years in the gathering of its tide, flow over me in that first hour before dawn. Then, with first light on the horizon (albeit dim and grey), I opened the gifts sent by friends, knowing as I undid each ribbon that they had made the effort to keep Christmas alive despite the weight of the times oppressing them. It gave me hope for better days. My wishes for you are that you find such peace in your own hearts on this day, and may Nature gift you with such beauty as she has placed along my path for lo, these many years.

Bubble Tree

Day 66: Tonight's post is born out of desperation. Unaccustomed to a social life, I find that I have one suddenly. The fruit of several trees including the Park, Morris dancing and even fishing has ripened into a jam-packed schedule of visits, practices and performances to such an extent that after two nights of no more than four hours sleep each, when I dragged back through my door late this afternoon and sat down in my chair, my eyes closed and my head drooped and the world was left behind. I waked to find it after dark, with no hope of staging the photo I'd wanted even if the rain had not been coming down in buckets with bits of broken branches flying through the yard on gusty winds. "Ack!" I said in horror when my eyes came open. "I haven't got a blog shot!" There have only been two or three similar instances in my eight-plus year history of  daily blogging, so I cast about the room for anything worthwhile and settled on the Bubble Tree, a fossil from my equally prehistoric childhood. I had hoped to refrain from too many of the season's seemingly obligatory images of ornaments and yard decor, but there you have it. One week to go, and then the hectic holidays are behind us...for this year.

Nostalgia

Day 67: I tell the story almost every year of how the bubble-light tree of my childhood deteriorated to the extent that my mother decided to throw it out, and how I pled with her to keep it, and how some twenty years later, I stripped it, rewired it and reconstructed it from the ground up. No part of the original tree remained but for the metal armature which held the light sockets and the base. I suppose I could have built a whole new tree more easily than executing the task I'd set for myself, but a new tree would not have carried the memories so strongly associated with the old one.

My father passed away when I was quite young, but I recall how each year when the Bubble Tree was set up on the table, he and I would talk about what made it work. I don't think we had the science entirely right, but whenever a light burned out, we almost always conducted a post-mortem of the mechanism. I was convinced that it was a chemical reaction; my dad insisted that it was physics, and to that end, we tried to determine the composition of the plug of glass-like material which lay in the bottom of each bubble tube. Was it a chemical compound as I suspected? Or was it simply a piece of frosted glass which regulated the release of bubbles as the liquid boiled under heat? Even today, I don't know for sure.

In any event, my remade Bubble Tree takes a place of honour in my home during the holidays, its spirit unchanged by the passage of time despite the ravages upon its physical being. The memories it holds are priceless, even if they are mine alone.

Bubble Tree Memories

Day 63: I don't really know which came first, the Bubble Tree or your narrator, but as far back as I can remember, it was set up for every Christmas of my early years. It was not always as you would see it today. No, its boughs were originally white, the needles made of a (presumably) fire-retardant paper. Its lights were somewhat squatter than these, although almost as tall, and encompassed a wider range of colored plastics and bubble tubes. Over the years, however, the white paper yellowed with age, and my mother's attempts to salvage it with spray-on flocking were disastrous. She wanted to toss it in the trash, but I protested and was allowed to save the poor, sad thing in the hopes of some day restoring it. When I moved away from home, it was consigned to an old steamer trunk in an unheated outbuilding where in a further indignity, it mildewed. The next time I saw it, I was in my twenties, but still I could not bear to consign it to the bin. Instead, I stripped off the moldy paper and salvaged the metal armature which held the lights. The lights themselves were no longer functional and were discarded as well. The base (a plaster pedestal) was in good shape, so I saved it as well.

Bubble lights had by this time disappeared from the market, so I held very little hope of being able to restore my childhood treasure. Then one year, they reappeared on the market shelves in the form you see them here. The tree required nine lights; the new strings only held seven. I did the necessary rewiring and installed them on the armature. Then I wrapped the framework with green garland, having failed to find the white I'd hoped to buy. It was a small concession to make when considering that I was giving my favourite item of Christmas decor a new lease on life. I also laid in a supply of extra lights, just in case.

That was about thirty years ago now. Today, fully lighted, the Bubble Tree again stands in my home, merrily bubbling away for a conservative half a dozen nights or so during the holiday season. At the rate the lights burn out, my stash of spares will last throughout my remaining years.