Lighting up the season
Good years and bad all look good against sparkles and glowing lights
By Joanna Beresford 12/24/2009
There’s good news and bad news about mistletoe.
The bad news is that it’s poisonous, it’s a parasite and it thrives on bird feces. Mmm, yummy. So romantic.
The good news is that it looks festive and delightful hanging in a doorway and we get to kiss under it, although that could be bad news if some smelly, slobbery sort of uncle or neighbor likes to lurk under the magical blossoms.
Another largely overlooked benefit of mistletoe: the plant serves a broad array of ecological purposes. Many animals depend on mistletoe for food. Some host plants flourish in the presence of the hemiparasite and birds like to nest in its leaves.
The kissing tradition, by the way, is relatively new. Apparently, the custom is hardly mentioned in historical references until the 18th century and the practice takes place largely in English-speaking cultures — except that the whole meet-you-under-the-mistletoe idea seems to have originated in Scandinavia, via Norse mythology. The word itself might either derive from the term “dung branch,” (not my preference), or from an Old English description of basil leaves (much better).
Anyway, mistletoe remains one of my favorite home-for-the-holidays traditions, but it’s not the only one. When I was a little girl, my favorite part of Christmas was Christmas Eve, with candles and carols and bells ringing and snow falling outside our windows.
And each child in our family was always allowed to open one gift on Christmas Eve, which involved tremendous excitement and strategizing. You didn’t want to open something major, like a pair of white go-go boots or a transistor radio, but you didn’t want to open a box of serviceable socks, either.
Speaking of socks, that was and continues to be the highlight of Christmas morning for me — stockings, hung by the chimney with care and stuffed full of surprises. If you go to Martha Stewart’s Web site, you’ll find about a zillion suggestions for making your own fabulicious stockings — knitting, sewing, gluing, bedazzling, stringing them along banisters and pinning them to ribbons that stretch from corner to corner. Maybe it’s too late for this year, but I took copious notes for Christmas 2010.
Lois Maher, president of the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) Pasadena chapter and founder of LVD Interiors, recently reminded me of another terrific holiday décor custom — beautiful table decorations. The local ASID members held their annual holiday gala this month at Caltech’s Athenaeum. A committee of designers created magnificent centerpieces for the tables, using natural branches bought from the flower mart downtown, glass chips and simple square boxes. Each branch held three custom-decorated ornaments in gold, silver and sparkles.
“They were about 24 inches tall, but the branches were so slender that we could see through them across the tables,” Lois says. “The designers really collaborated, and that’s a big message for us. We really work together and support each other in this community and throughout Los Angeles.”
The centerpiece committee made 12 arrangements and sold all of them by the end of the evening. Lois brought one to her own home; she plans to keep it on the dining room table or on her Steinway in the living room, where the lights and colors will reflect in the picture window behind the piano.
Lois described lighting that enhanced the table decorations and sparkled everywhere: on the ladies’ gowns, on a backdrop full of stars that hung behind the orchestra, among the decorations. Lights and sparkle is the way I think of the holiday. Good years, bad years, chaos, stress, work, travel, children, schedules and deadlines all look pretty good in the luster of sparkles and the glow of lights.
I have this miraculous string of tiny white lights that’s survived many relocations and upheavals. Last week, my daughter and I hung glittering ornaments on our tree that my family has made and collected for over a half-century. By some miracle, they’re still here. Their presence in my home cheers and chides me to be more grateful and to emulate them — to be full of light and sparkle and to endure.
I hope every home in Pasadena and beyond will be lit with peace and joy this year.
Happy Holidays!
Contact Joanna Dehn Beresford at truewrite@yahoo.com.
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