Matthew Hittinger's Blog, page 10

Ornament Stories: Day 22

The weekend before Christmas, my parents and siblings would pack into the family van and drive to the country to find the perfect tree. Sometimes our neighbor, Liz and her two children (and our playmates), Michael and Catherine, would join us to get their tree too. We would hike up and down hills covered with blue spruce, Fraser and Douglas firs, leaving scarfs and mittens on trees we thought might be contenders. And if we complained about why we had to wait so long when all of our friends had their trees up for weeks, we’d hear how when my father was a kid, the tree and all the decorations would come Christmas Eve after the children went to bed. Santa brought it all. The adults stayed up half the night, reveling and decorating and Christmas morning wonder was not just over the gifts, but a room’s yuletide transformation. I’ve since discovered that it was once considered unlucky to put up Christmas decorations before Christmas day. Clearly the powers of American commerce and capitalism trumped that tradition as they push the holidays earlier and earlier into October each year.

Ornament Stories: Day 21

Happy Northern Hemisphere Winter Solstice.  As I sit hear listening to Tori Amos’s Midwinter Graces, watching the sun already set low in the west, I’ve got to thinking about some of my favorite Christmas movies, and how dark they are. Like Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’m fond of singing “Make-ing Christ-mas, Make-ing, Christ-mas, la la la!” whenever engaged in activities like cookie baking or gift wrapping. And I have Jack Skellington on my tree for good measure. One of my other all-time favorite Christmas movies (yes, it takes place at Christmas, so it counts!) is Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (notice a common thread, here?). What can I say. Michelle Pfeiffer’s performance as Catwoman will always be my favorite interpretation of that character. As Bruce Wayne says to Selena Kyle, “You’ve got kind of a – kind of a dark side, don’t you?” Indeed I do.

Ornament Stories: Day 20

I think it is safe to say Christmas is the most important holiday in my family, especially for my mother. Every year on Thanksgiving night, after the meal has been cleared and we’re awake from our post-turkey naps and thinking about second helpings of pumpkin pie, the first viewing of White Christmas happens. When we were kids it was a marathon of all the stop-animation specials like Rudolph, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and our family’s all-time favorite, The Year Without a Santa Claus (“I’m Mister Heat Miser, I’m Mister Sun…”). White Christmas, though, along with the musical Scrooge, are my mom’s go-tos. And she’s infected her children with this strange movie obsession as I’ve watched White Christmas twice already this year and can practically recite the entire movie at this point in my life.

That’s one thing my mom asks for every year: a white Christmas. We had few growing up, Christmas Eve usually cold and dry, and if there were precipitation, it would be rain. Usually the first snow didn’t fall until the new year if we got any at all. In recent years we’ve had snow more often, including the recent Christmas blizzard. This year it looks like it’ll be cold and sunny, the snow having arrived a week early. As I’ve been watching the melt, and dodging dripping icicles, I thought of the crystal approximations of ice on my tree. One reminds me of a lizard tail, and has been around for as long as I can remember. And the others are three recent ornaments that arrived from my friend Sandra the other day. On the eve of the darkest day of the year, any substance that refracts light is a welcome sight.

 

Ornament Stories: Day 19

Since I mentioned my niece, a post devoted to ornaments from her: a stain-glassed pear she painted, and a cut-out snowflake. A Christmas tree should have a good mix of handmade ornaments and polished, store-bought ones. Both make me think of the giver, but the rough edges of the handmade ones always make me smile just a bit more. Why a pear and a snowflake? Well, the pear most likely to mark the pear obsession I once had; the snowflake, I’m guessing for the season.

My first book was a little chapbook called Pear Slip. Released in December 2007, it made the perfect gift for everyone on my list that year. Sadly, it’s out of print now (I have the remaining copies left if anyone’s ever looking for one; some of you still have it on your bookshelves, so you know it once existed!) but it launched a never-ending spree of pear gifts from everyone and anyone who knew me. Let me clarify one thing: pears aren’t even my favorite fruit to eat. There is something about their shape that catches my eye, and the play on pome/poem that is too hard to resist. When they appear in my work now, it is both a wink and a signal to my reader. And this isn’t the last pear you’ll see on my tree…

Ornament Stories: Day 18

Today, a fox from Sonoma, CA, bought in a shop off the central plaza. I lived in Livermore, California briefly, back in the latter half of 2005, with my bother, sister-in-law and niece. Many things in my life had come to a head that spring: end of the first post grad school year, cobbling life together via adjunct teaching and a return to admission counselor work, back in Pennsylvania, my relationship of 4+ years unravelling. It all needed to change if my creativity, my happiness were to thrive. I needed to challenge the comfort I felt myself sinking back into and live. And so I packed up my car and headed west, driving across the country on a spirit quest of sorts to figure it all out. I wrote a prose poem about this that I’ve never published, and thought I’d share it here:

Moving Image #4 [Contributor's Note]

Scratching down the things I see on the backs of gasoline receipts America crossed one August Pennsylvania trees Ohio flat Michigan rain a plastic bag flock swarms a farm in Illinois they twist white sun-caught and lunge gray underside cornstalk-perched Monarchs criss-cross Interstate 80 circle a biker distract him the silos the grain and missiles the silos and smokestacks of Iowa a man with powder blue toenails climbs into a pick-up truck lakeside bonfire suddenly the road ahead the same color as the sky Remember Terry bumper stickers and that was Missouri cows and man-made watering holes border every highway in Kansas a man dressed as the Jolly Green Giant hair dyed skin painted green grabs the shoulder’s metal girder hidden in the overpass shadow Oklahoma oil wells dot the landscape like scrubby brush a hammer line see-saw surrounded by hay bales and corn the yellow-red tops of stalky crops and the western hemisphere’s largest cross in Texas of course where miles of warehouse church crosses rotate to form the barn silo XXX-s but this descent into New Mexico desert as storms canvass and dawn striates the mesas and petroglyphs that alien landscape stays veins my face long after I rise into Arizona find my way into the valley up to the bay and I abandon my car oh California.

I enjoyed California, but the perfectly pleasant weather every day began to grate on me after a while. I’m an East coast boy: I need some drama to my weather, those overcast days that let you stay in and read guilt-free. And I found I missed New York City. I used to travel to it frequently for my admission job as it was my travel and recruiting territory, and found it calling to me once I got to the other coast. My best friend, Aimee, had recently moved there and needed a roommate. So I decided to move back after Christmas, just in time for 2006 to begin.

2005 marked the first Christmas my parents didn’t spend at their home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the 30+ years they lived there. They came out to my brother’s place, along with my younger sister and we did the holiday out there. It’s all a blur now as I packed what I could to transport back on the plane and rushed to sell my car. But this fox reminds me of wine country and golden hills and taking my niece, who was 3 at the time, out on night walks with flashlights to search for the neighborhood cats.

Ornament Stories: Day 17

Unruly bears. When Michael and I first started seeing each other, he gifted me a bear on one of our first rendezvous — a meet-up in Philly for a conference he had to attend, where I heard Joyce Carol Oates speak for the first time. The Hudson Bay Company issues a new holiday bear each year, and this was the bear in 2009. With a Canadian Maple Leaf tattooed to the bottom of his one foot, and a scarf in the signature black, yellow, red, green and white stripes of the store, this bear has come to be known as “Nicholas.” He has entertained us over the years with his wild stories about hanging out with Lonnie Anderson in the 80s and working as a speech writer for Clinton in the 90s. More often than not he rants about bear rights and monitors their portrayal in the media. So it is not surprising that bear spies have taken over our tree.

The light brown bear below is a mystery to us. Michael thinks he must have given it to me, but we’re not entirely sure. The bear insists on being hung on the front of the tree so he can see into the bedroom and converse with Nicholas. He also has a scarf, of red and green, and a hat to match. Hats are the obsession amongst the bears this season. You see, two other Hudson Bay bears have joined our little animal family: Henry, a light brown bear from a couple years ago who came with a sweater that the animals all fought over for a time; and pB, this year’s white polar bear who has a hat stitched to his head. Henry and pB stay in Montreal, and Nicholas in New York. Nicholas is a fugitive in Canada and not allowed across the border. We have yet to hear the full story of what he did, but he’s always hatching schemes to get back.

Which brings me to the second bear on our tree: this Canadian Mountie. He was saved from an empty work station at my office, abandoned by some employee who left the firm. I adopted him to hang out at my work station and for a time thought he was hunting for Nicholas to arrest him for this mysterious crime. But Nicholas assures me it’s just a costume and he’s not a real mountie, so we let him come home to hang out on the tree.

Oh what rich imaginative lives my partner and I live. Maybe one day we’ll jot down the adventures of our crazy animals for all of you.

  

Ornament Stories: Day 16

More creatures. The animals outnumber all other ornaments, save for the Christmas balls. But that is to be expected, especially since I met Michael over four years ago and discovered his heart for animals, he having grown up on a horse farm. Before I get to all the unruly bears we share space with, this ornament: a cow in overalls from my middle school art teacher, Mrs. Walker, who had an obsession with cows. Are the animals we become obsessed with totems of some sort? Do we locate some primal part of our minds in their behavior? What does it say about an artist obsessed with cows, that there is perhaps a pattern to the stereotypical white and brown or black spotted cow that draws her eye?

I think Mrs. Walker has since divorced and is remarried to an English teacher I had in the 8th grade. I did my community service requirement in high school for her, returning to Nitschmann Middle School to help out in her classroom. I lost touch with her in the ensuing years (almost 20 years ago now), but her influence on my pre-teen self — introducing me to painting, getting me in to the BAUM school of art on a free scholarship based on talent — still resonates. I may not have chosen the visual arts as my path, but they remain vital to my creative life.

Ornament Stories: Day 15

Last night my friend Emily had a holiday housewarming party at her new place in Park Slope. She asked her guests to bring nothing but an ornament for her first tree. And so we did. As the evening progressed and the naked tree filled with color and sparkle, a bird theme emerged. My gift: a white owl on a snowy branch.

I have not totally conceded owls to my older sister and her obsession. The owl was the Egyptian hieroglyph for the letter M, and so it is a quiet symbol for me, something I’ve been mining in the poems I’ve been writing for Book of M. I figured snowy owl would make a good emissary, a reminder to Emily in years to come of me. And yet of all the creatures on my tree, I have no owl. Maybe I should make a perch for one, too.

Ornament Stories: Day 14

Second grade. Mrs. Gombocz’s class. A jumble of memories, such as Mrs. Gombocz’s red hair. An arithmetic workbook. The guinea pig kept in the back of the room that certain kids got to take home on long weekends to watch. And this scene: one day I asked whether I could come back to the classroom after lunch rather than going out to recess when I was finished eating. Already I knew I was somehow different, didn’t fit in on the playground, would ruin games like kick ball because there always seemed to be rules that no one had taught me. And her response: to take my time eating so I didn’t have to go out to recess.

That Christmas she put up a small tree in the classroom, and filled it with brightly painted ceramic ornaments. There was a school holiday assembly where the different grades sang songs on the all purpose room stage. Back in the classroom the homeroom mothers were handling the refreshments for our holiday party. The Star Wars Ewok Adventure movie (those creepy giant spiders!) played on the TV where we often watched PBS shows like The Write Channel (“Palabra Jot!”), the creepy Letter People, and Readlong with Boot, Mister Bones and Granny.  And before we left for Christmas break, each of us got to select one of those ceramic ornaments to take home for our own tree. This was my choice: little mouse in his onesie, sliding down a candle.

Ornament Stories: Day 13

Some stories become mantras over the years, such as that first day of December when my younger sister was born it was 60 degrees and my mother brought her home in a light blanket. And then other stories are more of an impression, an image, the details hazy. Such as this stuffed mouse. Was it the year my sister was born? Her second year? It was early on. She needed a stocking made to join the rest of our stockings, a felt representation cut out and glued on to try to match the others. A toy soldier guarded the front of my stocking. And my brother’s. His had dark hair, mine light. We made a girl on my sister’s new stocking, in a purple dress with blond curly hair. But this mouse, one of many stuffed ornaments we made one year. Was it the same year as her stocking or another?

I remember cutting out the patterns and my mother running the sewing machine as we helped stuff the white fluff. This was not the white angel hair my mother used on the bookcase shelves in the living rooms, the substance I was warned away from as the filaments could get embedded in my fingers. Or maybe it was slice my fingers. Either way, I was to be careful. But I loved decorating. That mid-December tearing apart of the house, removing everything from bookshelves and replacing the books with wintery and nativity scenes. Porcelain mice building snowmen, pulling each other in sleds, ice skating around ceramic ginger bread houses. The wise men made to wait in the wings until Epiphany. And everything framed in twinkle lights.

By the time our cat, Wheezie, came to live with us, these ornaments were old, and we hung them low on the tree so she could bat them and carry them off to her hiding places. I can’t remember what the other stuffed ornaments looked like, or what happened to them, but I always loved this one, saved it somewhere along the way, and I still hang it on the lower branches of my tree. Mister Mouse in his sleeping cap, snug in a patchwork stocking, holding a tinier stocking in his paws. Waiting for a cat to come snatch him.