Deck the Halls, and Walls, and Yard...

    This post isn't an example of low technology, but there is a good deal of Victorian charm in it.

    Wisconsin is a place that has weather with conviction.  When it rains, it really rains; when it's windy, it's really windy.  We have tornadoes, we have blizzards, we have ice storms, we have heat and humidity.  And it can all change in a moment, as you will see later in this post, as we prepared for Yule.

    I come from a family of determined excess when it comes to Christmas.  My father would set up the Lionel train below the tree, complete with "snow," bridges, miniature trees, and little glass bead ornaments in the open coal cars which made it even more wonderful to a child's eyes.  Setting up both the tree and the train was an intricate and delicate process involving a good deal of scrambling around below the tree and showers of needles everywhere.  In order to create the "perfect" tree for my mother, my dad would pirate extra boughs that were left lying about where we had cut the tree down, drill holes in the trunk of the tree, and insert them so that there would be no gaps between the branches.  It was a labor of love.      

  

    My mother was no less indulgent.  There were ornaments everywhere: in the pans of the big, brass scales, in large brandy snifter vases, and the tree literally sagged from the weight of the ornaments hung on it.  We had multiple strings of twinkle lights on the tree, and it was my job to string them "just so" so that they were evenly spaced throughout the tree, including in the interior branches.  If you are wondering if my family was creating something from a film set, you would be right: my dad was an actor and a screenwriter for CBS, so it made perfect sense to us.   My mother said that if you could still see the tree branches or a gap after you had decorated it, then you didn't have enough ornaments.  On the top of the tree was an angel my mother named Saint Omelette.  I have no idea why.  She seemed just fine to me.

    I brought this sense of aesthetic insanity right along with me into adulthood, and Harvest and I began to collect ornaments as soon as we could afford them.  Because she is sensitive to pine sap, I was in charge of setting up the tree, adding the lights, and decorating it.  My trees would have made my mother proud.  At one point there were nine strings of twinkle lights on a single tree, all numbered, with the end of one strand plugged into the next strand and only three plugs on the extension cord.  I was blissfully ignorant of the impending electrical fire hazard that loomed over us.  Why the house didn't go up in flames, I'll never know.  One year I set up the tree and decorated the whole thing, lights and all, during the night so that when Harvest came down the next morning that was the first thing she saw.  Our tree topper was a gopher hand-puppet ("Gopher") that had a wreath on its head and held the single white light on the tree in its paws.  Gopher was the only thing available to top our first tree when we were young and poor, and she has remained our tree topper ever since.  I suppose it's no stranger than an angel named Saint Omelette.

    When we moved to Evansville, Harvest began to decorate the front yard for Halloween and Christmas.  This year, because everything had been turned upside down due to COVID, Harvest decided that she wanted to create an event in the front yard for the holidays.  She usually does some decoration, but this year she went all out.  

    Harvest had made the Father Christmas figure with the sleigh pulled by corgis some years ago. 

 

 

All the corgis pulling the sleigh have antlers except for the "puppy" who is jumping for the Sun ball.

    This year Harvest created another cutout for the yard: a goddess figure with a solar hex sign in the center.  She is holding the Sun, and the sign on the frame above her says, "Light is Returning!"  She stands where the witch was at Halloween.  It was early December, and the season was turning, but no snow yet, just dry leaves on the ground.

    Meanwhile, I was working on decorating inside the house, one-handed, in a cast.  Instead of a tree, we hang decorated swags at the entrances to the parlor, middle room, library, and kitchen doorways.   After using real branches for a number of years, we decided to opt for artificial swags rather than real ones.  It just didn't seem right to cut down a lovely tree to be used by us for only a few weeks when it could otherwise be a refuge for birds and animals and add beauty to the land.  

 The view from the front parlor toward the kitchen.

The kitchen is not immune from decoration.

                                Nor is the bookshelf.

Nor is the chandelier.

    Our decorations include lots of suns and moons and delicate glass animals, vegetables, fruits, pine cones, and acorns - symbols of longevity and abundance.  There is always a pickle hidden in each swag for luck.  According to an article in Good Housekeeping,"During the 1880s, the department store Woolworths began selling blown glass ornaments imported from Germany, some of which were shaped like fruits and vegetables. Around that same time, a story began circulating that German people hung a pickle on their tree as the last ornament. The first child to find the pickle got to open an extra present. But when Americans checked in with the Old Country, most Germans had never heard of the tradition. Common wisdom has it that some savvy salesman made up the tale to sell more pickle ornaments, and if today's trees are any indication, it seems to have worked."

    Sadly, my decorating finesse was wanting this year with my hand in a cast.  I had no idea how fiddly the process of hanging ornaments one-handed was going to be, and I lost four lovely ones to the floor.

Yes, that is a potato on the left.

And a banana.

    

    

    And then suddenly the weather changed in the way only Wisconsin weather can.  After days and days of 40 degree temperatures, there was one day of 50 degrees when everyone rushed outside to enjoy the sunshine.  Just two days later, overnight, it looked like this:

                                                

    

From out of nowhere, six inches of snow.

   

        And yet, what a transformation it made.  

    This year there we will be quietly on our own, just the two of us, without our usual holiday tea party or Yule Pageant, but the spirit of Yule has finally arrived at our house with the snow.  Seven long nights until the sun begins to return, but we know it will.