The stockings were hung... finally

Our property is graced with about seven enormous big-leaf maples and thankfully just one massive old-growth fir tree. It's a community landmark and I'm just gonna guess about it's about 300 years old. (Yes, that's my highly scientific raised-by-forester-in-the-heart-of-timber-country estimate.) What I know for sure is that the big tree is the skyscraper of our village and it drops a lot of branches. Well, I should clarify to say that it drops too many branches for my meager decorating needs. Sometimes it "drops" branches that would qualify as full-size trees in an established suburban neighborhood. One time it dropped such a branch on my husband's shop. But that wasn't very Christmassy at all.

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This year I gathered a few branches still holding on to their pretty little fir cones. Isn't it a miracle, the thousands of tree possibilities in those tiny cones?

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We put those miracles, found free in my yard, on the mantle with a string of lights. Then we added some candles, for looking at only as Grace says, and hung the stockings.

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I made our stockings, six of them, about seven years ago when our family was still just a cozy foursome and I still drove a Volkswagen. Cutting into those vintage holiday tablecloths (long-lived slight obsession with the vintage linens? check), I planned and thought of the biggest family with which we might someday be blessed. So now we have six stockings of faded turkey red, nearly pink with age, and soft sage green.

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One stocking is ever so cleverly decorated with Sarah's four-year-old lettering in Sharpie marker. I'll never know how she found the permanent pen but what was unfortunate graffiti five years ago is now the sweetest little reminder of days when she couldn't string letters together for hundreds of words on end as she does today in stories so beautiful it makes both the mother and the writer in me incredibly and inexplicably proud. (Despite my own blogsome run-on sentence problems!)

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Look what we've done, this family! Look at what a few years can bring. (Look how many stockings we can hang.) Not only are we a Suburban-filling family of six, we are blessed beyond measure. In just a few rings on an enormous tree's growth pattern, it seems we've grown more than those years would account for.

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Sometimes, especially when mired in the mundane, I look back on where we were and marvel at how life's seemingly meandering path has moved us so far. Even if I'm "late" hanging the stockings and "late" finding the ornament bins in the shop. Even if I haven't mailed my Christmas cards and the gingerbread house is still plain and brown. For just a minute I realize: today's tiny miraculous finds and even today's disappointments, when viewed from tomorrow, will be as beautiful as yesterday is to me now.

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We are decorated with the incomparable peace and love of this season. The mundane, the day-to-day, will surely pass. But we are steady as the tree out front, a landmark of our own lives growing so imperceptibly but surely in faith, and love, and beauty.

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May your season be blessed as ours has. Even if you haven't mailed your cards yet! (See what I did there? Throwing in a little forgiveness? Oh yeah. Feel free to join my procrastination station.)