Mele Kalikimaka

Growing up, I loved holidays and revelled in all the trappings allied with each one. Halloween and Christmas were probably my favorites, but I liked valentines, their silly and heartfelt verses, and the various modes of their delivery; wearing green on St. Patrick’s day and dabbling with Irish traditions that were really--I eventually discovered--mostly American; staying up until midnight on New Year’s Eve and then being noisy in whatever ways we had devised before the zero hour; and writing my name onto the dark with the flaming glitter of sparklers on the Fourth of July after staining the concrete, still warm from the summer sun, with the oily ash of cinder snakes. In fact, when I got married, my sister Diane informed my husband Mike that he was stealing away the family’s Christmas spirit.

As life unfolded, one year I decamped from the USA to see the world, supposing it would only be a year or two, and then it wasn’t. The wandering began in Europe, Germany to be exact--a land that accomplishes Christmas magically well. And in that German beginning, I notably enhanced my Christmas repertoire. Nevertheless, original plans and intentions, best-laid as they may be, do often go awry because life intrudes, interjects, and interpolates--shifting the route, changing up the crowd, and revising the design: and, for the next thirty years, I am rarely at my own home for Christmas. I’m traveling instead, and there are Christmases in Sicily and in Kenya and in the USA and in India and in New Zealand and in Belize and in Sri Lanka and in Tenerife and in London and in Galilee and on the ski slopes of Austria and in a boat on the Great Barrier Reef.

Then I bought a home in Hawaii, and this first Christmas season in my new home, I reinvented how I do Christmas. After spending a couple of weeks with family in Utah during the Thanksgiving timeframe, I returned to Hawaii, unpacked the boxes holding all my Christmas stuff, and reviewed what I’d actually collected over the years. My first day back, though, my neighbor brought me this:

(Those are real evergreen boughs, and they still smell divine.) So with this sweet piece of Christmas decor, I commenced my decorating for the next era of Christmases in my life.

Next I bought a Christmas tree--the first one I've purchased in at least fifteen years and maybe twenty. It may well be the last Christmas tree I purchase, too, because it is a fake--beautifully artificial. I put it together, "shaped" it according to directions, and then fine-tuned its position.

Since this tree comes sans "lit," I strung some lights. Truthfully, I think I'll be better at this endeavor next year; some areas of the lighting bother me, but I couldn't face unstringing and then restringing. Practice and lessons learned!

Ornaments--and the Christmas magic fully descended. Probably the majority of my ornaments connect to my years in Germany, but I have ornaments from before and after. The memories of moments and experiences cascaded across mind and heart.

After completing the tree, I placed the other pieces of my Christmas collection:

The Santas from various climes.

The Christmas pyramid--from Germany.

Christmas trees and nativities.

The foreground nativity under the tree is from Israel; the one to the right and farther back is from Korea. Both are hand-carved.

The rest...for the record...

Mele Kalikimaka!