Swimming with the (Yule) Tide

Fredrick and Nelson, downtown Seattle’s biggest and oldest department store, is long gone now, having gradually declined into suburban competition and finally succumbing to bankruptcy; but my memories of Christmas there linger.

We made the two hour drive north to Seattle from small Centralia at least twice a year: in August for school clothes and at Yuletide. In December, the Bon Marché and Frederick & Nelson windows displayed enchanting scenes of Santa’s workshop, A Christmas Carol, or The Night Before Christmas; a different theme every year, with extravagant life-sized figures with moving parts. Mesmerized, we stood on the steps constructed for small children to move from window to window, watching the fantastical mechanical figures twirl and bow and reach.

A pianist playing Christmas music accompanied our meander through the elaborately decorated first floor aisles of wood and glass display cases. Cases filled with gloves and jewelry and men’s ties and all kinds of boring things made desirable by our inability to touch and the beautiful young women in green aprons with the F&N insignia embroidered on the bib who opened the cases with gloved hands. My personal destination was the candy case, and I fidgeted impatiently until we got to it. Row upon row of beautiful chocolates, petit fours, and sugar-coated “fruit” slices. Frango mints (a F&N exclusive) and chocolate-covered orange peels were my favorites and always showed up Christmas morning in my stocking. For years after I left home, my mother sent the candies across the country to me.

My father was a forester, and each year the crew brought a load of Christmas trees down from the mountain for the Weyerhaeuser employees. Daddy always requested three scrawny Noble firs, which he put in a triangular stand he designed for them. We did not just have a Christmas tree, we had a whole forest in the living room. A couple of weeks ago, Rebecca and I went out to a lot to find our tree. Those who have ever had to pick out a Christmas tree with me, in a southern US lot that never heard of Noble fir––and I was never really satisfied with the substitutes––will be amazed…we got the first one we saw, and for $20. It helps that we were of one mind in the search: tall, slender, not pruned into a cone shape, space between the branches so ornaments hang. They are not prized here, either, but it makes me happy.

My favorite memories of adult Christmases are the quiet times. After the bustle of stamping newsprint with homemade stamps for wrapping paper with my children and frosting cookie cutter shapes in a way that vaguely resembled a familiar symbol, sugar cookie nuggets with chocolate peanut butter filling, Mama's Chocolate Halfways––shortbread dipped in chocolate––for delivery to friends and neighbors. When the handmade gifts––in the
lean years when there was more time than money––were completed, wrapped, and mailed across the country. When all the busyness was done, the quiet began. My young family went to Christmas eve services with our church family where we lit candles and sang Silent Night in the flickering light that reflected in the eyes of children filled with anticipation. Back at home, the kids in bed, the Advent waiting over, my husband and I poured wine, turned on soft Christmas music, and sat before the fire putting our treasures together, wrapping gifts for our two children, and filling stockings. We made wonder, and we were wonder, on the Night of Nights.

Now, the children are grown, the marriage is long over, and this year I have moved across the country from my chosen family. I will not sit in the pew in candlelight with them. I painfully missed my winter solstice candlelight circle of women this week. For the first time since I left home in 1976, no box of greens arrived on my doorstep from my mother, beings as greens are my doorstep again. Each year, with my dad when he was here and later by herself, she went out and cut fir and holly, wrapped the sprigs in a plastic bag with wet paper towels, boxed it up, and mailed it 2500 miles. When it arrived at my door, I eagerly carried it into the house. Slowly unfastening the twist tie, I put my nose down close to the opening of the bag. And then, I inhaled. I drank in the incomparable scent of the Pacific Northwest: the green, the damp, the mountains, my home on the hill. In that one first breath, home––including a mother's love––compressed into a bag, and my being filled with memory.

My children and grandchildren will gather on the other coast with their father and large step family this year. It will be a raucous time. It will be quieter here in the home where I celebrated the Yule with my sisters for so many years. And they will be here, too. We make preparations for our mother now, rather than the other way around. There are no children with wonder-filled eyes and giddy anticipation. The gifts that we have found for one another will wait under the tree for niece and nephew to arrive from Seattle. No one will be in a hurry. And we will remember days gone by through the power of our storytelling. And I discovered the old stereo still works! Perhaps we will Sing Along with Mitch and remember Daddy's off-key voice.

Am I sad? Yes. And no. Life has not turned out the way I envisioned it would, but that is the way for most of us, I think. I am nostalgic for my childhood Christmases and those of my young family. But, even as I swim against the tide of melancholy, my direction turns into the forward-moving current of what is. I have long since learned that sadness for the past can live contentedly in me with what is and with excitement for what is coming in the unknown future.

As often happens, yoga this week closes the circle of my thoughts. A poem during savasana washes over me like a cleansing wave: “Let go of the ways you thought life would unfold; the holding of plans or dreams or expectations––Let it all go. Save your strength to swim with the tide...Let go, and the wave’s crest will carry you to unknown shores, beyond your wildest dreams or destinations. Let it all go and find the place of rest and peace, and certain transformations” (Dana Faulds).
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