Fencerows: “The Perfect Christmas Wreath”
By John Luthens
John Luthens with a picked bundle of balsam boughs.
Our family was deep in the snowy, northern reaches of Douglas County on Thanksgiving, and that was step 1.
The leftover turkey and the pumpkin pie were decimated before the last football game had reached halftime, completing step 2.
When I rolled out of bed like an overinflated basketball the next morning and turned on the radio for the morning’s weather report, Christmas carols bounced through the cabin and echoed up the fireplace chimney. These were Steps 3 and 4, depending on one’s digestive tract and one’s tolerance for jumping the gun on Christmas tunes.
I counted the steps and found it official. The holiday season had leapt like a reindeer from behind a snowy pine. It was time to venture forth and construct the annual Christmas wreath. I felt like Santa. I needed a victim … I mean, I needed an elf. I sprung through the cabin in search of one.
My wife and my son were sound asleep. They were usually game for adventure, but had been up and about in the wee hours, making a pilgrimage into Duluth, Minnesota for holiday bargains. I debated waking them up on general principle before I saw the bags and packages. Maybe there was a new fly rod in one of the bundles with my name on it? I tiptoed out like a mouse to continue my search elsewhere.
My daughter was laughing and chatting with her Grandmother in the kitchen. They appeared on the verge of baking cookies and that meant trouble. The smells of turkey and pie were still hanging in the air and I was having trouble with the top button on my pants.
“Who wants to skip into the balsam forest to picks some boughs for a wreath?”
“I’m in,” said my daughter, taking me a little unaware. She is 14. Her preferred method of acknowledging my outdoor tangents is a nonchalant shake of her head and a roll of her eyes. She is beautiful, confident, and smart, and it seems she hasn’t agreed with a word out of my mouth since she was five. I felt I was on the verge of a major holiday miracle.
“I’ll be outside in a minute. I need to change clothes and brush my hair,” she said.
“We’re going into the woods, not to prom,” I answered. “You can wear this stocking cap.”
Amanda Luthens gives the thumbs-up to crafting a Christmas wreath.
She sniffed the cap suspiciously. It was a lucky shade of dirty blaze orange that I’ve refused to wash since the last time I bagged a buck. Come to think of it, the cap hadn’t been washed in many years. She rolled her eyes and stalked off to comb her hair. I was still in the running for a minor holiday miracle.
We walked silently into the woods with snow crunching beneath our boots. It was not an uncomfortable silence. It only came from building a wreath together but moving in opposite directions around the ring. It was the silence that comes from living and growing in the same family circle but running in different tangents around the edges.
The woods were wet and fresh. They were magic. We laughed and breathed, brushing the snowy ornaments aside and picking boughs from balsam trees that would have fetched triple digits in the Christmas-tree markets of the city. For a moment in time, the dog-eat-dog pressure of school and work and life had disappeared into the pines.
We piled our boughs on a snowy log and took in the moment. I pointed out an old bear den beneath the shadows of a deep ravine to impress my daughter with my astute knowledge of the outdoors.
“How do you know it’s a bear den?”
“I just poked my head in there and looked.”
Amanda Luthens displays the finished product.
My daughter turned for the cabin with a flip of perfectly-brushed hair. “This was a great idea, dad, and you know I love you. But it’s going to be really hard getting into a good college with you sitting in the branches of our family tree.”
I scratched my head and followed after with our bundle of balsam. A Christmas wreath is constructed of pine, but it’s held together with memories. This wreath was going to be perfect.
John Luthens is a freelance writer from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com or by contacting the author at Luthens@hotmail.com