My Mother as a Five-Pointed Star

The holidays bring out the dead like dust on Christmas ornaments.  Here is the knitted green and white stocking embroidered BECKY in red block letters pinned to the sofa every Christmas morning of my childhood and stuffed with gifts. Here are the hand-painted red candelabra that Mom brought back from Sweden after her divorce, braving her fear of flying to visit a dying man she had loved as a teenager. Here is the Christmas-cookie-thin five-pointed gold star etched NANCY RICE above birth and death dates.

“Mom as a Christmas-tree ornament, that is beyond tacky,” I complained when first retrieving the star from its plastic baggie inside the Christmas-tree-edged mailer from the funeral home.

But my soon-to-be-ex husband said it was “kind of festive,” and proceeded to attach it to a branch of the tabletop tree that Mom had bought years ago in Florida. Since I didn’t know whether he was being sincere or sarcastic and since the holidays tended to manufacture more marital discord than elves made toys—fights had erupted over broken glass ornaments and a shortage of wrapping paper--I decided not to object. The ornament stayed right where he had placed it, on an upper branch of the fake forest-green tree with its tiny, phallic-shaped lights and Lilliputian Santas.   

When we divorced six years later and divided up our stuff, I got the tabletop tree and the ornament, along with the Swedish candlesticks and my childhood stocking. The first holiday season, heady with the mulled-wine independence of keeping Christmas any way I chose, I considered leaving the tree and its creepy star in the basement of the rental unit where I had moved.

But I had a lot of time on my hands during that first post-divorce Christmas—my son lived mostly with his father and I had only brief filial sightings. To avoid feeling sorry for myself, a female Scrooge supping alone on grog and gruel, I fled not further away from Christmas but deeper into it, like a driver in a winter storm steering into the skid.    

After inventorying of my remaining Christmas-themed items—a tin full of reindeer cookie cutters, a couple of stained red felt tablecloths, my mother’s gargantuan Christmas tree stand that some wag at The Christmas Tree Shops had dubbed “The Last Stand”—I made an executive decision: time to restock.

Money was tight that year—I got my tree at Ace Hardware, when they went on sale for $10 a pop—but fortunately my redeemer was at hand: in the aisles of The Fisher Home of the Hospice Shop in Amherst, where Christmas could be had for a song, or, to be more precise, a Halleluiah chorus, recorded on a gently used Mormon Tabernacle Choir CD. At this elegant thrift store on University Drive, staffed by a platoon of welcoming, elderly ladies, I filled up shopping basket after shopping basket: I scored Santa tea towels, gold-tipped ceramic angels, Reindeer pillows, Frosty the Snowman candles, garlands of colored Christmas lights, boxes of antique Christmas ornaments.

Coming home with my Christmas booty, I spent afternoons descending into the twilight and obsessing: three Christmas pillows on the couch or two? Two strands of chili lights on the bookcases or one? Christmas wreath or antique horn above the pellet stove? One afternoon, with the thrilling strains of the Messiah urging me on, I clumped down to the basement, hauled my mother’s tiny tree from its cardboard box, smoothed out its arthritic branches, set it on an antique end table, plugged it in, and pondered: Star? Or no star?

In the end, I let the star stay on the tree, where it remains on the same end table in yet another rental unit. When my son comes home from college this year, we will bake Christmas cookies and play Handel’s Messiah and talk about his grandmother in the days before she became a five-pointed star and I will tell him, as she told me over and over again: “Your presence is the best Christmas present I could ever have.”

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