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todayiamadaisyI got some festive spam today: "Check out the wonders of pound melting!" Surely a Christmas miracle.
I write a little newsletter-thing for my Christmas cards each year, which usually includes a page where I wax reminiscent about the Christmases of yore. Here's this year's memoir:
Harp, horn & apple
Sister Adalbert kept an eagle eye on the stationery cupboard when I was one of the twenty-odd pupils at St Marcellus' Primary School, so it was a special treat for it to be opened in the presence of a student. Such bounty lurked within – office supplies and oil pastels and music books, oh my! Tucked away at the back of the cupboard was a large box labelled "Advent" in Sister's fine, old-fashioned copperplate. This was brought out on the last school morning before Advent, and all within was revealed.
Advent was a time of great excitement for us. It meant the start of summer, three weeks until the end of school and four Sundays until Christmas. Most importantly, because of the box, it meant a morning's deviation from our usually rigid routine (the same every day for Preps to Grade Six alike: prayer, religion, maths, recess, spelling, prayer, lunch, prayer, grammar, arts/science/sport, with a prayer to finish. Sister was keen on prayer. I think this strict prayer routine was what first put me off organised religion.)
There was an Advent wreath in the box, of course, a cardboard circle wrapped with green crepe paper and trailing plastic vine leaves. Sister produced four new candles every year, three purple and a red one for Gaudete Sunday. These fascinated me; I had only ever seen white candles otherwise. I assumed the convent where Sister lived was full of coloured candles – those lucky nuns!
There was a tree too. "Not a Christmas tree," Sister told us firmly every year. "A Jesse tree." Some of us didn't always remember that straight off, and called it the Chr-Jesse tree; others remembered only too well, and said the name with special emphasis on "Jesse" to rub it in.
The Jesse tree had ornaments too. These were symbols of different Bible stories, from Creation to the birth of Jesus, made out of cardboard by a long-ago pupil who could draw well. Sister would read out a spiel about a Bible story, and we'd each get to hang an ornament; that famous apple, the horn that wrought the Fall of Jericho, and so on. I always hoped to get David's harp or John the Baptist's shell, which were (I thought) the prettiest, but somehow always seemed to pick up a dull one, like Nehemiah's wall or Elijah's stone altar.
Every Friday of those last few weeks of school, the wreath and the tree were carried carefully across the school's oval to the church, where they were used for Sunday Mass. Once school had broken up for the year, they stayed there until the Christmas service. Purnim wasn't a big place, and at the time most of the people there were Catholic, so almost everyone we knew used our candles and decorations.
The school closed forever last year; the ornaments, being precious things made of flimsy card, were probably thrown out years before when Sister retired and was replaced by a less zealous lay teacher. I suspect if I could see them now I'd think them poor and clumsy. But they were ours and we took great pride in them and we shared them with our whole community – and that's no bad thing at any time of the year.
*****
And as a bonus, here's last year's much shorter effort as well:
The worst Christmas...
... was when I was ten. Three days before Christmas, my mother, my grandmother and I planned our final trip into town. I bounded down the footpath to the car.
Note the colours: the grey of the footpath as I jumped from paver to paver, the rusted iron of the gate as I pushed it open, the flash of red on my hands... and a long, thin, white bone lying on my palm. Then I was aware my mouth hurt, and I felt a gap in my bottom teeth and realised what the white bone was:
A whole front tooth, unchipped and pristine.
The dentist pushed it back in and I spent Christmas day with a sore jaw and a temporary plate.
(The tooth is still in place.)
*****
Merry Christmas to you all.
I write a little newsletter-thing for my Christmas cards each year, which usually includes a page where I wax reminiscent about the Christmases of yore. Here's this year's memoir:
Harp, horn & apple
Sister Adalbert kept an eagle eye on the stationery cupboard when I was one of the twenty-odd pupils at St Marcellus' Primary School, so it was a special treat for it to be opened in the presence of a student. Such bounty lurked within – office supplies and oil pastels and music books, oh my! Tucked away at the back of the cupboard was a large box labelled "Advent" in Sister's fine, old-fashioned copperplate. This was brought out on the last school morning before Advent, and all within was revealed.
Advent was a time of great excitement for us. It meant the start of summer, three weeks until the end of school and four Sundays until Christmas. Most importantly, because of the box, it meant a morning's deviation from our usually rigid routine (the same every day for Preps to Grade Six alike: prayer, religion, maths, recess, spelling, prayer, lunch, prayer, grammar, arts/science/sport, with a prayer to finish. Sister was keen on prayer. I think this strict prayer routine was what first put me off organised religion.)
There was an Advent wreath in the box, of course, a cardboard circle wrapped with green crepe paper and trailing plastic vine leaves. Sister produced four new candles every year, three purple and a red one for Gaudete Sunday. These fascinated me; I had only ever seen white candles otherwise. I assumed the convent where Sister lived was full of coloured candles – those lucky nuns!
There was a tree too. "Not a Christmas tree," Sister told us firmly every year. "A Jesse tree." Some of us didn't always remember that straight off, and called it the Chr-Jesse tree; others remembered only too well, and said the name with special emphasis on "Jesse" to rub it in.
The Jesse tree had ornaments too. These were symbols of different Bible stories, from Creation to the birth of Jesus, made out of cardboard by a long-ago pupil who could draw well. Sister would read out a spiel about a Bible story, and we'd each get to hang an ornament; that famous apple, the horn that wrought the Fall of Jericho, and so on. I always hoped to get David's harp or John the Baptist's shell, which were (I thought) the prettiest, but somehow always seemed to pick up a dull one, like Nehemiah's wall or Elijah's stone altar.
Every Friday of those last few weeks of school, the wreath and the tree were carried carefully across the school's oval to the church, where they were used for Sunday Mass. Once school had broken up for the year, they stayed there until the Christmas service. Purnim wasn't a big place, and at the time most of the people there were Catholic, so almost everyone we knew used our candles and decorations.
The school closed forever last year; the ornaments, being precious things made of flimsy card, were probably thrown out years before when Sister retired and was replaced by a less zealous lay teacher. I suspect if I could see them now I'd think them poor and clumsy. But they were ours and we took great pride in them and we shared them with our whole community – and that's no bad thing at any time of the year.
And as a bonus, here's last year's much shorter effort as well:
The worst Christmas...
... was when I was ten. Three days before Christmas, my mother, my grandmother and I planned our final trip into town. I bounded down the footpath to the car.
Note the colours: the grey of the footpath as I jumped from paver to paver, the rusted iron of the gate as I pushed it open, the flash of red on my hands... and a long, thin, white bone lying on my palm. Then I was aware my mouth hurt, and I felt a gap in my bottom teeth and realised what the white bone was:
A whole front tooth, unchipped and pristine.
The dentist pushed it back in and I spent Christmas day with a sore jaw and a temporary plate.
(The tooth is still in place.)
Merry Christmas to you all.
