Holiday Reflections

By the time you read this, the season to be jolly will be well and truly upon us. Everything unlikely to get up and leave will have been decked with sprays of holly and plastic snow. Public places will be thick with ring-ding-dingalinging and pa-rum-pum-pum-pumming. There seems to have been more talk about how early the holiday shopping season is getting started this year, but at the time of writing, a day or two prior to Thanksgiving, the sights and sounds of Christmas cheer still seem a bit muted, mostly drowned out by talk of turkey. Sure; go to the mall in search of a basting brush or a new twenty-pound-gobbler-sized roasting pan and you’ll make your way to it past the first glitterings of Christmas decorations. The sight of them mystified our daughter. Like most other red-blooded American children, Mathilde has a highly evolved internal clock that enables her to keep track of the time remaining until the next birthday, Easter, Christmas or other occasion that might involve presents or chocolate with atomic precision. Of course when you’re four, and you’ve been schooled by your parents not to go on and on about what you want for Christmas, a month is an eternity. So Mathilde greeted the presence of Christmas trees and tinsel and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer at the mall with the deep suspicion of a child from whom something has been withheld. “Why is the Christmas tree here now?!” she inquired, querulously, of every authority figure she encountered—the Queen Bee shop lady, her music teacher, the Salvation Army bell-ringing person. Apparently a good question. No-one, in her opinion, returned a satisfactory response.

Still, I admit that Christmas commerce is in full swing at our house. This is not because we’re inherently well-organized or convinced that an earlier Christmas is a better Christmas. It’s because if most of our gifts aren’t selected, wrapped, cocooned in peanuts, boxed, taped, labeled and handed across the post office counter before Thanksgiving, they’re not going to make it to their Australian recipients in time. American retailers who have their holiday decorations up and are already torturing their store personnel with the Barbara Streisand Christmas album in mid-November have finally gotten into step with the amount of time it takes for a package to make it from Louisiana to Melbourne. I’m not complaining; the fact that a parcel handed to the cheerful lady at the St. Francisville post office can possibly make it across the country, across the Pacific, and across Melbourne, to be precariously stuffed into the saddlebag of a little red motorbike that an Australian postman will then ride through my mother’s flowerbeds to deposit on her doorstep, still astonishes me. It’s just that, by the time the impossible journey has been made, our carefully wrapped offerings generally arrive three weeks into January, squashed into interesting new shapes, aand occasionally bearing signs of close scrutiny—sometimes involving scissors—by customs people. There’re few things as heartwarming as unwrapping the sweater from your mother to find a ragged hole cut in the front of it, the mangled wrapping re-secured by the reassuring label, “Your package was opened for inspection and found not to contain any prohibited items.” Well, thank goodness.

Inter-hemispheric gift exchange presents other challenges. Given that the Australian Christmas falls in the middle of summer, sweaters and woolly hats aren’t good choices, even if they slip by the scissor-wielding customs guy. Fragile, delicate things are out for obvious reasons. Heavy stuff isn’t good either. We try to abide by a rule of thumb that the cost to mail a gift should not exceed the purchase price of the actual gift. Which rules out ceramic garden gnomes, handmade paperweights, sugar kettles, decorative boat anchors, and Chef Folse’s exceptional Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine. There is a way around this restriction, which is to procure, parcel and post our Australian Christmas gifts by early July, in time for them to make the journey by sea mail. But whenever I consider this option I am reminded of that Tom Hanks movie Castaway, and feel compelled to buy gifts that would be useful to survivors of a South Pacific shipwreck (fishing gear, compass, floatation aid, waterproof matches); and in any case, we’ve never managed to time it right.

So what’s left? Tea towels are good. Weird hot sauce is good if properly cocooned. The other day I found a traveler’s sun hat, the main selling point of which was its ability to be comprehensively squashed, then returned to its original shape. We bought a couple of beautifully carved (lightweight) wooden hummingbirds at Covington’s Three Rivers Art Festival last week. It would be nice to send more locally made arts and crafts to a place where they will be truly unique. But most of them present a fragility challenge. Our daughter said it well. After a couple of high-strung hours spent inspecting the exquisite, mostly breakable handmade objects in artists’ booths at the Three Rivers festival, Mathilde’s mother asked her the question, “What is art?”
“Mama, art is something you’d better not touch,” she replied firmly. Tell that to the customs people.

There’s another thing that, sadly, won’t be getting air-mailed to Australia this Christmas on account of its impressive dimensions. But for everyone not required to ship their gifts half way around the world, I’d like to draw your attention to the latest book by regular contributer and original Country Roads editor, Anne Butler. Her book The Spirit of St. Francisville marries Anne’s clear-eyed grasp of the Felicianas’ past and present with atmospherically beautiful photography by Darryl Chitty. It’s an especially handsome coffee-table-worthy tribute to what makes St. Francisville special. Easy to wrap, too.

So happy holiday shopping, everyone. And more to the point, Happy Holidays.