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“…. by participating in a ritual, … you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important.” Joseph Campbell

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It’s January 7, the day after Epiphany. Yesterday, Mary Lee and I watched goons in red hats knock our democracy to its knees. Still, as I’ve done on today’s date for I don’t know how long, I put on The Christmas Revels, (a CD; we wore out the tape we bought right after we’d seen a performance of this Solstice celebration over thirty years ago) and begin to take down our Christmas tree, removing the ornaments, packing them away for another year.

“Wassail, wassail, all over the town…”

We take off the unbreakable ornaments first. Most of them come from our travels: several woolen sheep of various sizes and a wooden long-haired highland cow from Scotland, probably our favorite country to visit; a couple of olivewood Jerusalem crosses from Israel; a weighty wooden St. Nicholas from Cambridge, England; and a porcelain nazar, an eye-shaped Turkish amulet believed to protect against the evil eye, which we bought in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. (And which for some reason, I can’t get to print. You’ll have to Google it.)

“Here come I, Old Father Christmas…”

Putting them away in the bottom of the box, I think of Columba’s Bay on Iona, the cobweb of streets in the Old City of Jerusalem, drinking “Green King Ale” in The Champion on the Thames with Dick and Janet Graham, sharing Turkish meze platters with our friends Lynne and Finlay. Later today, I might dig out a map or a travel guide to expand a snippet of memory into a full narrative, some of which might even have actually happened. If not, so what? It’s my memory.

“The boar’s head in hand bear I…”

Next, we take off the homemade ornaments from the children and grandchildren. Mary Lee’s sons used to make God’s eyes—you know, running different colored yarn around various sized crosses. We’ve also got decorations showing their growth into adulthood: a couple of felt cats named for Jeremy’s first two pets that followed him around from one apartment to another, and—perhaps our most unique ornament—a soft brown diarrhea microbe, which was from Jeremy’s wedding to a professor whose PhD is in Tropical and Diarrheal Diseases.

Our most recent additions to the tree are from last year, when all four grandchildren were into fuse-beads, which for those of you who haven’t played with grandchildren lately are colorful beads arranged on a plastic pegboard to form a pattern or a shape and then fused together with a clothes iron (which is, quite frankly, the only time we’ve used an iron in the last 20 years).

“There was a pig went out to dig,

Chris-i-mas Day, Chris-i-mas Day…”

Many of the more fragile ornaments come from our childhoods and get wrapped in tissue paper. Mary Lee has an angel that her mother remembered from when she was a girl, making it around a hundred years old. I’ve got a couple of glass ornaments from our family tree, as well as a plastic Santa Claus on skis from the 1940s that I’m pretty sure came with a six-pack of Coca-Cola, which I used to drink in vanilla ice cream floats on Christmas Day after we’d opened our presents (which would have been about 9:00 in the morning. Yeech!)

“The holly and the ivy…”

Perhaps because my parents grew up in homes where Christmas was fraught with alcoholism and other family disfunction, they tried hard to make sure their children’s Christmases were happy ones. And on the whole, they succeeded. For me, Christmas is a time to remember and honor my family, not just my parents and siblings, but the extended family of which I am a part.

“Dance, then, wherever you may be

I am the Lord of the Dance,” said he…”

The two ornaments Mary Lee gave me for our first Christmas together go in their own boxes: a red ball—naturally—for the Boston Red Sox and a silver and green one for the Boston Celtics. Both teams have had their ups and down over the last 35 years, but by in large, they’ve done well. Mary Lee and I have also had our ups and downs, but I think we’ve done even better.

“Nowell, nowell, nowell,

Nowell sing we clear!…”

My most prized ornament, and I usually pack it away last so that it’s right on top to put on first next year, is a cloth ornament my daughter Laurie embroidered for Mary Lee and me for our first Christmas together. She was sixteen at the time, two years away from the cancer that killed her. Wrapping the ornament, I see by her signature on the back that this was the year she called herself by her middle name, “Leigh.” A time when a future of limitless possibility seemed to lie before her.

“On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me

A partridge in a pear tree…”

It usually takes just about as long to put away the ornaments as it does to listen to the entire Christmas Revels, which I’ll also set aside for another year. These songs and dances celebrate the fusion of Christianity and the pagan festivals surrounding the winter solstice and the rebirth of the year. In many ways, they are a dance of light and dark, death and life, past and present.

I’m packing away, then, not only ornaments but memories and stories, both happy and sorrowful. And while I think it’s important, especially as I age, not to dwell on the past but to focus on the present and the future, these ornaments will stay with me throughout the rest of the year in some closet of my subconscious, subtle yet constant reminders that what has saved me before in times of grief, illness, and addiction—faith, family, friends, the natural world, art and music—can save me in today’s lethal political climate, can save me in the future.

They give me a reason to want to live. They give me hope.

“God bless the master of this house,

With happiness beside,

Where’re his body rides or walks

His God must be his guide,

His God must be his guide.”

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