Cranberries and Popcorn
It’s a memory and a hope, all at the same time.
Hi friends,
We put our Christmas tree up a bit early this year. Since my husband is American, we adopted his tradition of decorating on the weekend after American Thanksgiving in late November rather early in our marriage but this year, due to our mutual travel schedules, we had to change plans and so we set up our artificial tree1 about a week earlier. As we hung ornaments from travels and milestones over the years, our four children - three of whom now look down at “little old mum” from their higher heights - retell the stories I’ve told them all their lives: this one is from the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, this one is from preschool, this one is from mum and dad’s first Christmas together in 1999, that one is from Mum’s first trip to Green Gables on PEI, this is from a neighbour we lost touch with over the years. Our tree is a mish-mash of colour and memories. The kids know all the words of our stories by now.
Last week, our two younger girls (who are in grade 8 and grade 4) asked if it was finally time to make the cranberry and popcorn strings for the tree as well as the dried orange slices. They felt that the tree was not finished until those garlands and oranges were up on the boughs. They wanted to watch old comfort tv shows from their preschool days like favourite episodes of Little Bear as we worked.2 (My oldest two are in university and grade eleven now. They were both busy cramming for finals that week so it was just us three in the kitchen for that evening’s work.)
When they were a pack of tinies and money was very tight, we didn’t have the extras left for “real” store-bought decorations on the tree at Christmas, so I began to make these sorts of homemade old-fashioned decorations from whatever was on sale at the grocery or craft or thrift store. The salt-dough ornaments soaked in acrylic paint and glitter didn’t survive past ten years, I’m afraid, but every year they still want to make cranberry and popcorn garlands and to dry out orange slices for the tree. This is one of those in-a-pinch fixes of their childhood that somehow became a family ritual.
We put the kettle on, found the old DVDs in the basement, and set up the kitchen table with our freshly popped popcorn and thawed cranberries along with my sewing kit from Walmart that I bought in 1998. I sliced up a tired half dozen of navel oranges from the back of the fruit crisper and laid them out on parchment to slow dry in a low oven while we worked on the garlands.
Evie and I alternated the cranberries and the popcorn kernels on sewing thread while Maggie coloured next to us (she was nervous about the sewing needles), talking about their own favourite memories from when they were little. As we finished each strand, we would drape it over the tree boughs, nestling the garlands amongst the ornaments and twinkle lights.
When they were tinies and I was just making the garlands at our second-hand kitchen table as a way to fill up a rather sparse tree, I remember telling myself that someday I would have a fancy tree. Someday, I would go to The Bay! and buy that Gluckenstein stuff! that is so pretty and so expensive! I would have a colour coordinated tree! and Dollar Tree wouldn’t know me at all! Someday I’d create the magazine looks! that I saw on the fledging Internet at the dawn of the mom-fluencer age. I’d be a freaking Pottery Barn catalogue come to life! Then I poked the sewing needle through a popcorn kernel that promptly crumpled in my hand and kept going.
Well, it’s been almost twenty years since then and here I am, still at the table, making cranberry and popcorn garlands with a pack of kids who insist on loving what we have loved in front of them all their lives.
When my older two kids were very tiny, I was deep in the throes of my own deconstruction. I could hardly bear to attend church. But my husband wanted to hold onto the traditions or rituals that meant something to us once, so our compromise that year was to attend for Christmas services and do the tradition thing just one more time. I promised to be a good sport but I didn’t know how my crisis of faith was going to end and I was riddled with questions, cynicism, anger, and doubt. Cue the Christmas pageant.
I signed my then-just-two tinies up for their little nativity play. I taught them the actions for “Away in a Manger” and dressed them up as farm animals in the church’s borrowed costumes. That Christmas Eve, we stood in a church that wasn’t ours with people who weren’t our friends just so our kids could participate in the same things we once loved. I didn’t know what I thought about anything to do with the faith or if I wanted to be part of institutional religion any longer (actually, I desperately did NOT want to be part of institutional religion) and I was pretty sure this might be my last time doing this. It was a thing I did for the man I loved, not because I really wanted to be there myself.
But I remember that night so clearly because when the small church choir began to sing O Holy Night, I just lost it. The tears welled up in my eyes and dripped down my nose. I just could not stop crying, no matter how sternly I told myself to get a grip. I was almost mad at myself - was I so easily manipulated by singing and candles? - but then … then, I just gave up and let myself believe for the night, just one more night.
There was something about standing in that nearly empty church with the remnants of a once-thriving congregation, surrounded by elders who had endured, singing those old hymns that felt exquisitely sharp to me. I had forgotten that some part of me loved this still.
I had walked into that church, ready to throw out every single that had once mattered to me and resenting even having to be there, but now? Now I realized that I wasn’t ready to say a total good-bye, not yet. I didn’t know what I thought about church or the Bible or big theological issues that were bothering me or what this would mean for our lives moving forward,3 but in that moment, when the small congregation sang out that “his law is love and his gospel is peace,” I thought to myself, God, I still want this. I don’t want to lose this. If that is the actual gospel, I think I could stick around on the edges of this forever.
I still had a long few years of wandering in the wilderness ahead of me, but that was a moment that I remember to this day. Just one moment in a small candlelit church that I never did attend more than a handful of times with people who never knew me and old hymns worn familiar by generations of voices at Christmastime. The tendrils of ritual wound around me and held me up, when everything else felt like it was collapsing.
It planted a little seed of “I think I might want to hold onto this part” in my heart. Even if I didn’t believe the same way that I did once, perhaps I still belonged in the story.
Maybe the traditions and the stories and the hopes of this wild Gospel story could be mine from the edges, too.
Maybe the traditions or the stories could hold me when I wasn’t sure what else did.
Maybe I could be complicated and questioning and evolving and still find a spot in the story.
Maybe the traditions were mine and they could stretch and grow and evolve with me.
Rather than a prison to contain me, perhaps these old songs and faithful saints and wild stories were actually a scaffold that could allow me to grow and flourish and stretch out to the sky.
“An evolving faith doesn’t mean we burn down everything that was once precious to us,” I shared with you in Field Notes for the Wilderness. “There is something between everything and nothing. We aren’t required to toss everything we grow and change, becoming more fully ourselves. There is room to honour and hold space for the precious and the meaningful even as we evolve in our beliefs, our homes, and our lives. It’s okay to bring some things with you. ….
I can’t tell you what is precious and what should be discarded. (Well, I mean, I can, but I probably shouldn’t. Look at me, I’m growing!) I’ll just say this: stay open. Stay open to the ancient paths and old wisdom and good saints. Stay open to the Bible verses you loved when you were a kid and the songs that you still sing at night when you think no one can hear you. You don’t have to make fun of everything you used to love, and you certainly don’t ned to despise it. Handle your old ways with gentleness. You might find something to love here eventually.”4
When our kids were littler and we were firmly in what Madeleine L’Engle rightly christened “the tired thirties,” I didn’t know that we were creating the traditions our kids now cherish. I didn’t know that these little choices in the moment would become the kitchen table rituals they cherish - or someday reject, perhaps.
At the time, I was just trying to fill in a rather sad and empty Christmas tree but now those are the family traditions they embrace. Even though we could probably go buy those colour coordinated magazine-worthy ornaments at last, they still want cranberry and popcorn garland draped on the boughs and dried out orange slices to dangle from Walmart sewing thread - that seems to replenish and renew like the widow’s oil, a discount miracle I still behold - on the branches and their kindergarten favourites and twisty-pipe-cleaner-antler-adorned candy canes with googly eyes to beam at them amidst the lights.
They want the stories that have meant something to them over the years. They are crafting their origin stories out of the raw materials I handed them in their childhood.
I thought of that long ago Christmas Eve service this past Sunday as we sang O Holy Night together at church, just a few days after the garlands were made. We hit that same line - his law is love and his gospel is peace - and I remembered how just that one line in an old song while my kids were dressed in borrowed costumes as farm animals in an unfamiliar church kept me holding on, kept me clinging to a story. It was a memory and a hope, all at the same time.
I suppose I am still crafting an origin story out of the raw materials I was handed by others. Some things needed to go and good riddance, but so many of our old rituals turned out to be precious to me in the end. I decided to hold onto them - or perhaps they hold onto me. Maybe the gift of faith is more simple than we expect, maybe it’s found in a few tears in a strange church over a familiar song for just one moment to believe again. It’s a small moment that contains a whole universe of story. It’s a memory and a hope, all at the same time.
Nowadays, when O Holy Night plays at Christmastime, my children instinctively seek eye contact with me, whether we are at church or in the mall or driving in the minivan. I think they must subconsciously be waiting for that moment when I will look at them and smile and say, “This is my favourite one,” because I always do. Then they get to say, “We know, Mum,” with a smile and I will know they know, yet I say it every time and they look for it every time, another link of ritual in the stories that hold us together.
Someday maybe, years from now, they will hear the song somewhere and tell their children or a friend that their mother used to love that song, she just loved it, even if no one believes it anymore.
After the little girls were asleep and the older two were still neck-deep in their books, I pulled the now-dried orange slices out of the oven. I sat on the couch while the Flames game finished up, poking a sewing needle through the rinds. I tied slipknots at the join and hung them up in the tree. When the twinkle lights are tucked behind them, the orange slices transformed into stained glass in the dark, as if lit from within.
The morning after we made our garlands and orange slices, my eldest daughter wandered by the tree on her way to that final exam for sociology, coffee in hand. She reached out and touched the garland. “I’m so glad we make these still,” she said.
As long as we still love it, we’ll keep doing it, I said.
I hope you let yourself love your own story,
S.
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We used to be a “real tree only” family but then, well, you guessed it: one legendary Christmas, we had a Dead Tree/Needles Everywhere Apocalypse one week before Christmas morning and after cleaning up eleventy-billion pine needles for hours - when we moved out of that house years later, I was still finding pine needles in nooks and crannies - I promptly drove to Canadian Tire and paid cash money from our budget for a pre-lit artificial tree and never looked back. P.S. Brian has never forgiven me for getting a white-lights prelit tree since that was all that was in stock that day: he feels that multicoloured lights are the heart and soul of the tree and keeps hoping that the tree will give up the ghost one of these years and we will be justified in the expense of replacing it. But alas, the prelit artificial shrub endures and so he endures.
It will surprise none of you to know that I was very, very careful about what television shows our kids were watching (Guard your gates etc. Bless my own heart.). We couldn’t afford cable and streaming wasn’t a thing when my older three were tinies - so we owned exactly three DVDs which they practically had memorized. One was a Sesame Street DVD and the other two were an old CBC show called Little Bear. Oh, the playtime fun inspired by the time they spent with Little Bear and his little group of friends like Cat and Owl and Duck! (I aspired to be as calm as Mother Bear, tbh.) Later we added the 90s classic The Magic School Bus and when I tell you that my then-elementary kids freaking loved that show, it is an understatement. To this day they talk about going “inside” Ralphie.
Spoilers: a lot would change.
" If that is the actual gospel, I think I could stick around on the edges of this forever." is what I have been telling myself over and over these days. Thank goodness for kind and tender fellow travelers.
I am navigating Christmas this year with an ache in my chest. We have not attended church all year but as Christmas rolls around I am desperate for candlelight and hymns. We are going to be visiting some challenging family for Christmas and I desperately don't want their church to be our only experience this year. I have such a hard time with church during the rest of the year, but this time just gets me and I come crawling back to the rituals I've set aside the rest of the year. My favorite song is O Come O Come Emmanuel. That's the one that when it is sung I finally feel a little lighter in my chest.