Until I was 34 years old, I spent every Christmas at my parents’ home. That year, 1979, I was in rural Borneo, experiencing a Kenyah Dayak Christmas, complete with American carols translated and taught by fundamentalist Christian missionaries and a single community Christmas tree, with lovely (and dangerous) lit candles casting shadows around their church. In 1984, in rural Sumatra, I fashioned a tree out of a tall bar stool, covered with green cloth onto which we pinned newly-home-made, largely paper ornaments. Driving from Padang in West Sumatra, back to my home in Riau in late 1991, I saw a woman by the roadside, and asked her if she would cut me a tree (from what was surely part of the National Forest). I remember my triumphant return and the surprise and delight of my son and husband (despite my having joined the ranks of Indonesia’s ‘illegal loggers’). Then, as we were packing to leave Jakarta in 1995, we cut out a big tree from green paper, drew ornaments on it, and pasted it on our living room wall. One manages.
But in 2009, my husband and I moved into our very own house. We were able to assemble our respective, long-stored possessions, and for the first time, to satisfy fully our love of the holiday and of Christmas trees. What a lifetime of associations are represented on our ‘fully loaded’ Christmas tree! I sit before it, marveling at this wealth of memories. My favorite ornament is a wooden, flying Santa Claus with detachable wings, bought in Jakarta’s American Women’s Club gift shop in the 1990s. There are quite a variety of Indonesian ornaments on the tree: a brown ball of star spice and cloves bought in a traditional market that had been transferred to a low-end Jakarta mall; a stuffed batik fish; several ornaments made of translucent goat skin shaped into a heart, a Javanese mountain, a fish, a peacock; a translucent flat glass bell bought at one of Jakarta’s high end department stores.
Two of my special favorites are white angels, crocheted by the Filipina mother of my son’s good friend from Jakarta International School (also the wife of a one-time colleague in Bogor). There is a still-beautiful ball covered in white velvet, decorated with pink and matching printed ribbon, made and given to me by one of my best friends, Lorna, in Seattle, when I was in grad school in the 1970s. She’s a true artist, as the Christmas ball attests.
There are a whole raft of beautiful ornaments made of papier mâché, decorated with Indian designs shaped into bells, stars, and balls—bought in a market in New Delhi a decade ago. On that trip, my luggage was lost and I had spent the whole prior week in an isolated resort at a meeting, washing my underwear each night and switching between my two blouses, day to day.
My husband brought many ornaments to our tree from his previous life: He’d fashioned several flat, blue and maroon, origami fish (his field is fisheries). He and his previous wife had also made lovely elaborate balls covered in deep blue velvet, gold braid and pearl-headed pins. His mother, Lola (now deceased), also provided us with decorations, some inherited from her parents, including some very large balls, for which special branches have to be sought—to accommodate their unusual leaded weight. There are crazy, cat-shaped ones that his sister had sent to their childhood home in New York from California, to amuse their cat-loving mother in her dotage. And there are scores of simple colored balls of red, green, blue, silver and gold in varying sizes (and a few odd shapes), as well as some strange, fuzzy red ‘apples’. We also inherited a few lovely large balls from her—some opaque, some translucent—decorated with bright red cardinals.
My mother prepared for us a special box of ornaments she considered to have special meaning. One of these is a flat cardboard Santa Claus that she enjoyed as a child in the 1920s and ‘30s. There are several green balls with badly tarnished, decorative silver wire that I remember as extraordinarily beautiful when new, during my own childhood in Turkey, in the 1950s. My parents had bought these once-festive, German creations in the military PX in Ankara. She also gave me a variety of ornaments made of foil that she and my Dad had purchased when he had a Fulbright fellowship for a year in Singapore at the time ‘Vietnam fell’ (1975): Some look like silver or gold tubes, until the ends are pushed toward the center, at which point they form a striped ball, under which foil rays gently curve down and out. Other foil ornaments fall from a central hook, forming a burst of gold or silver rays. Still others are spikey balls of red or blue. Mother had also collected flat, gold colored commemorative circles. One commemorates the Hollywood Theater in Portland, Oregon, where I had my second paying job, in 1963—a flat replica of the building hanging within the circle. Another is formed of criss-crossing flat stars, with a globe in the center—given in honor of our travels. She included some from my paternal grandmother as well—odd plastic creations, a couple of trapezoids with stars inside, a star and a white angel, each fashioned of [fake] pearls.
And there are ornaments made by our children when they were young, reminders of our own younger lives and of their childhood beauty and innocence: a red origami box, some small, flat, inexpertly-painted wooden children. There are other decorations whose source I can’t remember: A cute, three dimensional, stuffed granny face that looks a bit like an apple doll head. No idea where I got that. There are some flat Santa Clauses outlined in gilt, a small colorful and glittery coral fish, a strange unpainted flat wooden ‘tree’. The most recent acquisition, I got from the Estate Sale at my mother’s partner’s house. It’s a smooth top, made of several natural colored woods, with a metal circle on the top from which to hang it—reminding me of my life at the Center for International Forestry Research, as well as of my well loved, recently deceased pseudo-step-father.
Aaah, the pleasures of Christmastime!