My husband’s deceased wife celebrated the holiday in a grand way, with not one, but four Christmas trees, and several industrial-size boxes of ornamemts. How would I put my imprint on the festivities?
Before I got married, I never thought much about celebrating Christmas in a major way. Having lived life as a bachelorette until the ripe age of 51, I threw a few ornaments in a vaguely festive basket and called it a day. I didn’t realize that I was really in a “resting mode” –waiting for the time I would inherit Christmas from Sheila.
Sheila was my husband’s first wife. She was married to Wilson for 40 years and she had a definite thing for the holidays. She spent hours scouring specialty shops for the perfect ornaments and other Christmas decorations, and she bought them with gusto. Sheila lived and traveled the world with Wilson and found a way to appreciate each culture with a keepsake ornament—or ten. By the time she died of a brain tumor in 2003, she had amassed so many ornaments that several industrial-sized boxes were filled to the brim with her holiday haul.
Enter the former 50+ bachelorette, now the brand new wife. Faced with duplicating Sheila’s full-out celebration of the season, I panicked. Sheila didn’t just have one tree, she had four. There was a “cooking tree” that depicted her expertise in the kitchen and Wilson’s love of wine and food. There were two outside trees to be simply decorated with shiny silver balls, then the breath-taking living room tree that she spent three days decorating, and another three taking down. Add to that countless holiday-themed stuffed animals, angel statues and other accessories.
During my first Christmas as the second wife, I began opening the boxes that Wilson let languish for the first year of his new life as a widower. It was like entering a world I would never know. Wrapped carefully in tissues, the ornaments were an archeological dig into a life filled with celebrations and adventures. There were delicate paper fish from Japan, about 15 Celtic crosses from Ireland and wafer-thin brass disks or stars with commemorative messages to celebrate a certain Christmas event.
