Mornings feel cold enough to need a coat when I take Abby out. The ground is frost-covered; so is the roof. Maybe we will have some winter, after all.
As the song says, “It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.” There are lights and decorations, the fragrances of pine boughs and paperwhites, colorful displays of possibilities for gifts and decorative papers for wrapping them. And parties, parties, parties.
I always feel behind at this time of year. No matter when I start, it’s always too late. Everyone else is so much more organized, I tell myself. I will be better this year. Then I’m not. It used to make me terribly stressed and depressed, unable to enjoy anything at all. I can never achieve the holidays of my childhood that my parents made to seem so effortless.
I loved the holidays when I was a child. My parents made them magical. Not lavish by any means, but magical, and so very special. I was the envy of all my friends because my family had the eight days of Hanukkah and Christmas, too. My parents had the drugstore, filled with holiday chocolates, colorful cards, and fancy gift boxes of perfumes and shaving supplies, wooden or tortoise shell hairbrushes and combs from England, beautiful writing papers and fountain pens. We kids had the store and our house to decorate. And we did.
Those memories swirl around me as the holidays near. I walked into the library party and smelled the clipped greens the staff had prepared for wreath- or swagmaking, beside a table covered with ribbons and baubles to tie onto them.
On Sunday afternoon, I stood by the windows of Station 2, awaiting the arrival of Santa Claus. So many people were there, the friends of my lifetime in West Tisbury, the friends who are now grandparents or great-grandparents. The babies of my early years in town have grown into the parents standing beside me. Watching them with our new generation of children, our future, thrills me every year. As does seeing Santa. This year, Rudolf stopped by to help Santa, Kenny, and Louie hand out backpacks filled with gifts.
The Second Sunday jazz concert at the library was beyond fabulous. I have become an insane Darcy Patterson fan. She sang with Jeremy Berlin, Eric Johnson, and Taurus Biskis, the Jeremy Berlin Trio, who were fabulous, too. The concert was jam-packed, SRO, in the Program Room, where Harriet Bernstein’s “Pink Paintings” hung on the walls. She will be at an artist’s reception in her honor at the library this Friday, Dec. 13, from 2 to 4 pm.
My library-made swag hangs by the door of Mike’s and my house. There are lights along the garden fence and across our porch. I have started to bring up boxes of decorations from the basement, to wipe down windowsills and shelves where I make little Christmas village vignettes. The candles are in the windows, with boxwood wreaths hanging above them. Cookie-baking supplies are stockpiled alongside cookie cutters of every shape imaginable.
I am thankful for Iyla bringing her enthusiasm every Thursday. I decorate and bake for her.
If you have any West Tisbury Town Column suggestions, email Hermine Hull, hermine.hull@gmail.com.
