Boxes in the Attic

When it came to holiday decorations, my parents tended to be hoarders. I'm not talking about ceiling-support-beams-groaning-from-the-weight-of-life-sized-artificial-reindeer-filched-from-the-city-dump levels of accumulation, but certainly a level of pack-rattiness that led to a labyrinth of overstuffed cardboard boxes in the old family attic. My mother found it impossible to throw out anything her darling children might have made or brought home at any festive point of any given year. We might not have always used them. But we sure had them, just in case.

Although we never formally decorated for Halloween, my mother still maintained a large cardboard box crammed with October’s refuse. It included apple-head witch dolls that had reached such an advanced stage of desiccation that they resembled voodoo fetishes, leering pumpkins cut with pinking shears from construction paper, limp orange and black garlands of crepe paper, and a particularly hideous wreath made of macaroni and candy corn that I'd made in church kindergarten. I'd used more paste than pasta in the laborious construction, and the candy corn’s sugar had blurred into a vaguely coral haze, but my mom wasn't going to let it go.

For Easter, my parents used to tap pinholes into the ends of eggs and blow out the insides. (We weren’t a hard-boiled egg family. Nobody liked the texture.) We'd spend a night filling little bowls with vinegar, then dropping Paas tablets into the liquid and thrilling at the fizz. Delicate as the empty shells were, my parents loved them because they could be stored away in Styrofoam eggs crates to keep for succeeding years. Even when I was in high school, my mom was hauling out the eggs I'd made at the age of four. There they'd sit among the newly-dyed specimens that still smelled vaguely of pickles. Their purples and greens and pinks were nowhere near as lurid as the newer eggs; they'd acquired a patina of age that rendered their cracked and chipped exteriors gently mottled, like old marble. Old marble, that is, slapped with crumpled and fading bunny stickers.

It was with Christmas decorations, however, that my mother’s magpie tendencies really came to the fore. Nothing that ever had been employed as decoration during the merry month of December escaped the eternal grasp of her packing box sarcophagi—no mater how old or crumbling or non-functional they might be.

One of the very first craft projects I ever undertook was with out next-door-neighbor, an aspiring school teacher in the Lakeside apartment complex that was our first Virginia home. She had me squeeze a heavy white frosting-like substance from a piping bag onto wax paper, into which she pressed metal ornament hooks and then set to firmness in the oven. Though they were intended (I think) to resemble drifts of snow, these goopy blobs resembled nothing so much than dog turds ossified white in the hot sun. Still, my mother kept them wrapped in tissue paper in old Thalheimer’s boxes, year after year. Despite my protests about how hideous they were, she would pull them one by one from their wrappings and hang them on the lower branches of the tree . . . which in theory were the only branches sturdy enough to support the decorations’ cement-like bulk.

My sister and I, at some point when we were very young, received some kind of holiday craft kit from a neighbor or piano teacher comprised of very thin sheets of balsa wood and tiny tubs of cheap paints. The idea was that one was supposed to push out the pre-printed and perforated shapes from the balsa—various Santas, snowmen, Rudolph, and patrician New Englanders riding in sleighs while wearing top hats and muffs—then paint them delicately and cherish them as handcrafted keepsakes. Our problem was that the wood was cheap and so paper-thin that it disintegrated from the pressure of the paintbrush, much less the twenty chubby juvenile fingers attempting to separate them. No matter. My mother risked splinters to hang the garishly- (and not exceedingly accurately-) painted monstrosities year after year.

Likewise, she cherished a set of ‘stained glass’ ornaments we made by doling plastic pellets atop metal frames and then melting them at a high temperature in the kitchen oven until the house smelled like a Dow Chemical plant. Even years later, after the plastic had long fallen out, she'd still hang the metal skeletons.

Naturally, my mother had real treasures that she cherished. There were a few real eggshells that had been sliced open at an oblique angle and painstakingly hand-painted and decorated on the inside. The artist had set wooden figurines within to make miniature dioramas of manger scenes and Santa on his sleigh. My sister and I could be trusted to hang the white frosting turds or the more indestructible ornaments. The eggshells were so delicate, and so laden with gold braid and tiny pearl-like beads that when we’d decorate our tree, my mother would insist on hanging them herself. She had a handful of other ornaments from her youth she considered sacred; these she kept packed in layers of musty-smelling tissue so old that it crackled like wildfire and disintegrated at the touch. She’d hang her keepsakes high upon the boughs in places of honor, beyond the reach of little children and the packs of tree-climbing house cats that roamed our home.

The true valuables, however, were very much in the minority. They were buried in an avalanche of Styrofoam stars blotched with glitter, by halos fashioned from bent clothes hangers wrapped with sad lengths of pink garland, by plastic cranberries and kindergarten handprints in clay. They were outnumbered by the artificial pinecones encrusted with spray-on snow from a can, and leering felt elves, and tiny stockings given out as party favors at school.

And on New Year’s day, the family would pack away antiques and ephemera alike into the dozens and dozens of boxes from which they came, and store them away for another year, when they’d be rediscovered and treated like heirlooms of old.