Put up the tree. It's a special tree, artificial though it be. When I moved back to Amityville in January 2002 to live with & take care of my mother in her last year and a half of life, I brought this with me -- and she decorated it with what was left of all the old Kettelhack ornaments (some of them very old - dating back to my German grandmother's era) - most of them '40s & '50s vintage, which I suppose makes them antique now, but they just seemed like tasteful suburban baubles back then. I've left the ornaments pretty much exactly where my mother placed them Christmas 2002 (she died July 2003). Took off three of my faves (put them back where they came from!) to showcase (2nd pic) -- the two big ones especially are as incised in my memory as anything else I can conjure up from childhood. Loved looking at them then, love looking at them now. (One of my many connections to Alan Watts is that he really liked looking at jewels & jewel-like surfaces. He'd like these too, I bet.) On Christmas day I shall undoubtedly reprise my fave Christmas pic (1964 I think) of Laura and me at the foot of the Kettelhack Christmas tree (a live one, then) -- in the house she now lives in -- & in which she celebrates, with her family, beautiful Christmases of her own.
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