It is a few days before Christmas as I write this. Our tree, which we bought and decorated the weekend after Thanksgiving, gently perfumes our living room with its piney fragrance. In a couple of weeks, my wife and I, with the help of our two young daughters, will remove the lights, the ornaments and the garlands to the accompaniment of the final strains of our favorite Christmas songs. Then I will carry the bare tree outside and deposit it atop our brush pile in the backyard.
As I sat pondering the tree the other night, I realized it had some things to say about living lightly on the Earth, a perfect topic for this column. The word mundane, after all, means both worldly and ordinary — as in, what ordinary actions can we take for the benefit of the world we live in? Here’s what I heard from my Christmas tree.
No. 1: Gather. More than a decade ago, my wife collected several pine cones and sweet gum seed pods to hang on our tree. She decorated these gathered items with glitter and hung them with wire. We still use them every year.
How can we meet some of our needs and wants by simply gathering what is already freely available? Our house is surrounded by large oak, hackberry and beech trees that drop an abundance of leaves on our lawn every fall. Rather than chop them up with the mower or pile them on the roadside to be carted off by the city, we rake them into a large pile in our backyard to use throughout the year as garden mulch and compost material. Our only “payment” for this renewable resource is a couple hours’ work with a rake and a tarp.
What is waiting to be gathered around your yard or neighborhood?
No. 2: Give. Many of the ornaments on our tree were given to us. A few are relics from my or my wife’s childhood, mementos of Christmases past. Others we received from family members to help decorate our tree as a newly married couple. Whenever I hang the large bright red globes, I think of my wife’s uncle, who sent them to us. These given ornaments carry memories of and connections to some of the important people in our lives — a rich web of relationships that would be missing on a tree festooned only with purchased ornaments.
What do you have to give that someone else might use and enjoy?
No. 3: Make. Along with our gathered and given ornaments are the ones we made ourselves. Over two or three Christmases, our family made salt dough ornaments. If you’ve never used salt dough before, it is a simple recipe that makes a kind of dough that you bake to harden it. (Warning: Young children will swear that your salt dough ornaments are cookies and ask repeatedly if they can eat them. They can’t.). We made snowmen, Christmas trees, stars, handprints and amorphous blobs. After they baked and cooled, we painted them. Now they adorn our tree each year. Most of them, anyway. We made a ton, and eventually they had to be culled. Like the given ornaments, they connect us to each other, reminding us of the time we spent making them together.
What can you make for yourself that you might normally buy?
Before I carry the de-ornamented tree out to the brush pile in a couple days, I will snip a small twig to remind me of the beauty of what is gathered, given and made.
L.B. Blackwell lives in Chattanooga with his wife and two daughters. He blogs at mundaneway.blogspot.com.