Matthew Hittinger's Blog, page 11

Ornament Stories: Day 12

My company’s holiday party is tonight. It’s at one of my favorite places: the MET’s Temple of Dendur in the Egyptian wing. I love holiday parties: the decorations, the food and wine, the winter wardrobe of sweaters and corduroy. But most of all the cheer, the gathering of people at the darkest time of the year, faces illumined by twinkle lights and candles, giving trinkets and gifts to the people we love and cherish. That is what the holiday means to me in my adult life, acknowledging the Christian myths tied to it as they are important to my parents, while in my heart feeling a deeper Northern hemisphere tradition, one that underpins a rekindling of light in the winter darkness.

Which brings me to this ornament, a gift from a friend from a former life. I spent the first fifteen years of my life at my dad’s second parish, Rosemont Lutheran Church. And one of my friends during high school was Hayley Schellhaas. She was a year older and went to a different school–Saucon Valley, over the mountain–but her family was active in our church and she introduced me to another close friend from those years, Sandy Kalman. I went as Sandy’s date to their school’s winter formal one year. Her dad drove to Bethlehem to pick me up and take me back to Hellertown where she lived. The formal was at Lehigh’s Asa Packer campus on top of South Mountain, that building with the observation tower and the 360 degree view of the Lehigh and Saucon Valleys. There are many stories from this period of my life that I never tell: many of my friends were outside of my own high school, from my involvement with the Lutheran Youth Fellowship, of which I was President for a time. When my faith broke at age 18, I broke with many of those people and memories. And though the inscription on this ornament might seem trite, it is what the holiday now is for me: a time to cherish the gift of my loved ones in my life and this world.

Ornament Stories: Day 11

Maybe it’s a sign of age, or a sign that I have too much going on in my head, but as vividly as I remember who gave me certain ornaments, I can’t remember who gave me others. Take this glass square, profile of a snowman, easily one of my heaviest ornaments but one that always makes me smile. I’ve associated it with my older sister for years now, but she’s confirmed it didn’t come from her. So apologies to you, dear friend or family member, if you gifted me this ornament one year. I have clearly forgotten its origin, but it is still full of associations.

For instance back when my older brother and sister-in-law were poor grad students at UM, my sister-in-law made many of their Christmas gifts, much like my younger sister does these days by knitting up a storm each December while she works on her PhD. But my sister-in-law went through a phase of making snowmen families: a tall daddy, a medium mother, and a small child snowman, complete with wooden hats and ribbon scarves. They were made from logs that she whittled near the center to give them a neck of sorts between the head and body. And she painted them white, adding black buttons and eyes and using smaller twigs painted orange for carrot noses. My mother still puts them out near the fireplace and every year I imagine their panic being so close to the flames on Christmas day.

But the reason I associate this ornament with my older sister is because of her snowman phase. Maybe the phase never ended–she’s confirmed all her snowman themed decorations are still around–but they must share space with all her owls now. When people have obsessions (my mom’s include elephants and Santas) it makes it easy to find them little gifts. In fact I think my mom went through a snowman phase, too. I remember buying her S’mores snowmen ornaments, snowmen made out of fake marshmallows, skiing on graham crackers and chocolate. Snowmen, snowmen everywhere. Behold the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” “One must have a mind of winter” to see they work for not only Christmas but the early months of the new year.

Ornament Stories: Day 10

On my tree, a wooden wreath of spools, beads, twine and ribbon, another craft from one of my younger sister’s December 1st birthday parties. If it were made of fake evergreen limbs, it would surely get lost on these imitation branches, and its weight makes it sag a bit. But it got me thinking that perhaps I should get a real wreath for my apartment door this year from one of the tree vendors on 30th Avenue.

The day after Thanksgiving, two competing tree lots go up near my apartment: one outside of Key Foods, the other outside of Rite Aid. Walking down the sidewalk is like walking through the forest, and the smell of fresh pine is intoxicating. Usually one of the lots will start to sell wreaths from all the lone branches severed from the adjustments and bindings made at sale time.

My mom would make wreaths close to Christmas, calling our neighbor to ask if she could cut some greens from the overhanging boughs in our yard. And we had faux wreaths on the front windows of our house for many years, secured by wires which were hidden by a large red ribbon as if the wreath were dangling from that thin piece of felt.

Circle of evergreen to symbolize the seasonal wheel, the birth-death-rebirth process. A totem in the dark of winter to remember the green spring that will come. A crown of candles for the head, or at the X points of a candelabra in the church during Advent, lit by the taper, snuffed by the bell, this sister circle to the home’s Advent log.

 

 

Ornament Stories: Day 9

My parents and older sister were in town from Bethlehem yesterday, a bus trip they make every couple of holiday seasons. The last time they were here my younger sister from Boston and older brother from California were in town too, a little family reunion just months before my mother would be diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Through new treatments she is in full remission, though a new prop accompanied her on this trip: a cane to help with all the walking (and threaten my father with when he teases her).

We hit many of our normal stops: the Bryant Park shops, lunch at Connelly’s near my office, seeing a show. Over the years they’ve seen many shows including The Grinch, the Radio City Holiday show, and yesterday Wicked. And I finally got to show my father the Red Caboose, a model train and hobby store down the block from my office.

Electric model trains are a thing in my family. When they were all here a few years ago I took them to the train display at Grand Central. And my niece and nephew love them, as did I growing up. One Thanksgiving we took them to a place from my childhood: Koziar’s Christmas Village, which has a huge multi-track train display with tunnels and a village and miniature people. My brother had HO gauge trains, and I remember a Christmas Eve when he was sick and stayed home from church, putting up the smaller of our two train platforms in the corner of the rec room, two sides covered by that corrugated red brick cardboard, the green grass mat stapled to the platform’s surface, the tracks tacked to that.

My father’s train is an O-27 gauge and some years we’d put the larger platform up for his train to go round. This was when I didn’t have the platform covered with chicken wire and papier mache mountains for my Lego castle empire. Though I loved my dad’s train, I was always a bit more fond of laying out and putting Plasticville together, the town that the train circled. It’s my earliest obsession with city building and urban planning that still manifests itself in games like SimCity. Those little plastic buildings and Hot Wheels cars we used for traffic, the shrubbery and trees made from clumpy, spongy ground foam. Our visit to the train store yesterday got us talking about putting my father’s train up again, under the living room tree which we did one other year when I expanded Plasticville with some new additions I found online and at the hobby train store in Nazareth.

After my family left last night, I wandered through the Bryant park shops and found a train ornament. A 2013 addition to my tree to represent the family train stories. It’s a wooden, toy train, not the elegant black engine of my father’s train, but it does the trick in triggering the memories.

Ornament Stories: Day 8

Today I bring you Wonder Woman. She is gayborhood-adjacent.

Those who know me know of my love for her. My homage to her–”Orange Colored Sky”–was just accepted to the anthology Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. And though that poem chronicles my childhood memories of Lynda Carter’s portrayal, there are other incarnations I love: the Gail Simone run in the comic books (not just for her take on the origin story, but the queer-friendly gifts of the Manazons and Achilles!); the animated Diana in the early 2000s cartoons Justice League and Justice League: Unlimited. But I have other loves from the comics. Catwoman. Jean Grey/Phoenix. She-Ra. And outside the comics, Madonna and Marilyn Monroe. I think I should have ornaments for all these loves. For isn’t that what people’s trees become in some respects: reflections of things they love through small baubles that are either exact replicas (though I still struggle to find a Marilyn Monroe ornament that does her justice), or charged parts that stand in for the whole (take this I found on Etsy)?

Side note: I have a fabulous crocheted She-Ra crown courtesy of my friend Amy Jo. You can see me wearing it here as I perform my She-Ra monologue “For the Honor of Grayskull”.

Ornament Stories: Day 7

Last day of the gayborhood tour, though through this lens one could argue all the ornaments on my tree are a little gay. Today I bring you a fabulous and crazy glass ball that I rescued from the family tree when some old ornaments had to make way for new ones. Objects glow and fade that way: charged with meaning  for years, and then one day no more. Or depending on the beholder, it loses significance as I suspect this ornament did for my mother.

I don’t know its story before I rescued it, but I know why I saved it–my mother’s glass balls are so perfect and smooth and stately, and this one is spiky, technicolor, with a burlesque pasty tassel and disco vibe to it. It spoke to the inner, queer me I was just discovering in those adolescent years. It also reminded me of a children’s book I used to love, The Glass Mermaid, about an ornament I think comes to life on Christmas eve to a boy who falls asleep under the tree. The plot is gone from me at this point, but I remember the book’s cover and associate that glass mermaid ornament and the colors of that cover with this spiky ball.

I also remember it was one of the first ornaments I put on my first mini-Christmas tree. My mother had bought a tree for me and one for my little sister for us to decorate and put in our bedrooms. And I had this tree for years–through high school, college, grad school until I moved to NYC. And then my ornament collection grew to the point where I needed to upgrade. So now I have a four foot tree. And the Christmas bush, as that little tree came to affectionately be known as, went to live with my friend Emily.

Ornament Stories: Day 6

One happy discovery upon seeing those old ornaments of Stephanie’s was finding an echo: the pervy elf. My elf recently joined the ornaments. He’s not even technically an ornament, just a bendy little guy that turned up one day and sits contentedly on a bough. Aimee, my roomie and “wifey” thinks she introduced him to our home, though also can’t remember where he came from or how old he is, though he is mysteriously missing a few fingers. Stephanie’s elf appears to be the inspiration for the infamous d*ck in a box sketch from SNL. But neither of these elves have anything on that strange “elf on the shelf” phenomenon I see creeping into my friends-with-kids’ social media news feeds. The pervy elf does see everything, after all…

 

Ornament Stories: Day 5

When Stephanie was still alive. It’s still odd to write those words, to think back ten years ago to memories of a time and place so different from my current life. Memories of weekend trips to Carlisle, PA to visit Brian, my boyfriend of those years. Memories of my first job out of college–an Assistant Director of Admission at my alma mater–the job that allowed me to meet Brian. Memories of when Brian introduced me to Stephanie, and the year she had a “trim the tree” party with us and our friend Viki. As we unpacked a number of questionable ornaments that all looked like denizens of a gayborhood, we devoted a section of the tree to them and thus began a tradition I keep to this day. As inheritor of Stephanie’s ornaments, Brian was kind enough to send me some photos, which I will pair with my own in the coming days. What better way to start than with a disco ball rescued from a monitor at work when our company changed buildings, and Stephanie’s peppermint horned unicorn.

Ornament Stories: Day 4

And that is why we never had our tree up on December 4th. Or December 10th or 17th. First came Advent. And my father, a Lutheran minister, wouldn’t let us forget that. We’d bring out the Advent log of birch—ancient Druidic tree of renewal—with three purple and one pink candle, and would do Advent devotionals at dinner each night where we rarely ate meals except for special holiday occasions. With each passing week an additional candle would be lit—the pink one was for week three, for Mary—and they’d look like wax steps, week one the shortest, week four barely burnt.

The Church liturgical colors during Advent were once purple, but changed to blue as purple was also used for Lent. Liturgical seasons rhyme that way: blue for the waiting season of Advent, purple for the waiting season of Lent. The Star of Bethlehem on South Mountain also echoed the seasons for me: during Advent and Christmas the Star looked like a star, the star that led the wise men to the Christ child. During Lent, just the cross-piece was illumined so that the star became a cross. With the star kept lit year-round, now, all local sense of the religious, liturgical calendar has been swept out of the public eye, the star now representing the secular identity the city has adopted as “Christmas City, U.S.A.,” represented by the sale of miniature glass-and-leaded Moravian Stars, a version of the Star of Bethlehem, also known as the Herrnhut Star or the Advent Star.

I have two Moravian Stars: a blue one that hangs year-round by a window in my living room. And recently returned to me, a clear one I gifted to my friend Stephanie more than 10 years ago. Stephanie passed away after a long battle with cancer, and her partner returned the star to me so I would have it to remember her by.

 

Ornament Stories: Day 3

We never had our Christmas tree up this early. In October, small trees would start to appear at every intersection, bound to the four signal posts. On the day after Thanksgiving, the three local high school bands—Liberty, Freedom, BeCaHi—would alternate years performing at the tree lighting ceremony. Freshman year of high school, part of the band’s first company, wind in our bearskins, the lights twinkling off the gold buttons of our Grenadier uniforms, off our polished black shoes, off my French horn’s bell as we ran through the standard carols. And before the star on South Mountain became the seal of the city, it too would have its moment, sudden blaze at the smudged haze where charcoal mountain crest meets midnight sky. There were also four electric candles, steel shapes staggered in a diamond shape, outlined in light – four here in the plaza next to the public library; four on the Hill-to-Hill bridge into South Bethlehem; four near Hellertown upon entering the city. But only one of the four would be lit. Lit for the first week of Advent, that forgotten liturgical season before Christmas.