Mary Henry
A while back, I spent part of the Holidays in Finland and Sweden with stops in Norway and Denmark. What amazed me was the elegant simplicity of the decorations in their homes.
A clear glass bottle holding a sprig of pine, tied with a small red bow, a bouquet of cedar boughs in an old crock, five or seven berried holly branches sprouting from a silver tea pot. Gone were the inflatables, the battery-operated Ho-Ho-Ho of a mechanical Santa, the metallic sheen of gaudy plastic ornaments crafted to look like glass. A single ornament that had the look of antiquity, or a perfect conifer cone, might rest atop a nest of spruce clippings, beside a hand carved and painted elf. And everything glowed with candlelight. I thought “This is how Christmas is supposed to look.”
I consider everything from Halloween to Saint Patrick’s Day to be part of our Northern Hemisphere’s Winter Festival. No matter one’s religious or philosophical orientation: Diwali, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s … whatever one believes, it all falls under that mantle of having faith that the quiet darkness and cold of winter is only a sleeping world, that will awake in spring. It is our job to supplement that slumber with a dream.
What I saw in Scandinavia was that people used what was around them to conjure that dream. It looked beautiful, smelled wonderful, and it celebrated what they had, what they lived with, what they saw before them and cherished.
In our relatively mild Pacific Northwest climate, nature gives us an abundance of plant material, with which to create these homages to the season. To gather them has a practical side. Few gardens are not in need of a bit of pruning. Collecting, sorting, preparing these bits of greenery is akin to a religious ritual. What you end up with will celebrate your own creativity and remind you of the abundance amidst which we all live. The arrangement you see pictured here robbed nothing from the garden: a branch of stiff dark emerald Yew, a soft green shoot of Crytomeria japonica, an Aspidistra leaf, some variegated Pittosporum, and the red berry clusters of Cotoneaster. Any of them could stand alone. Together they work in organic harmony.
Set aside a day. Go out into the garden with the kids or grandkids or school pals. Walk the garden, pruners in hand. Talk about what needs to come off to enhance the beauty of the plants. Snip the bits. Come inside and create a holiday arrangement. It will be a lesson in creativity, a bonding experience, a reinforcement of the ancient concept that nothing is more beautiful then nature.
Once collected, put these garden gleanings into a container filled with warm water. Strip all the foliage that would go under water from the stems. Make a fresh cut on each branch just as you put it in the water. Change the water every four to seven days. It helps to mist the foliage daily and, given a night that is not freezing, to put the assemblage outside overnight.
No suggestion here that there should not be blazing lights of the tree, or perhaps rings of tinsel around the cedar ropes that festoon the front door. No, this is America, after all. But spend some time this holiday season channeling your inner Scandinavian. Make it natural, make it simple, make it a memory that will be carried though a lifetime … make it a winter dream that will be passed on to future generations.
Wishing everyone the very best of this joyous time of year.