Comfort and Joy

My favorite childhood Christmas decoration was a pair of mice - a mother and her baby - which my mom always displayed on the top of the toilet commode for the few weeks leading up to Christmas.

I'm not sure why I loved those little rodents so, or why they were perpetually relegated to the bathroom. I seem to recall that they reminded me of characters in my favorite Lithuanian childrens' book series, and I must have admired the minuscule candy canes and holly berries that adorned their necks. Every year the setting of the mice atop the commode was, for me, the highlight of the family's Christmas decorating tradition.

I revisited the mice statuettes recently when sorting through ornaments at my parents' house. They were much less interesting than I'd remembered them - The velvet tufts of fur were threadbare in places, one mouse's ear was missing, and the paint on the holly berries around the other one's neck was chipped to reveal a plain old Styrofoam craft ball underneath. It was hard to believe those two tattered little mice had once represented for me the very pinnacle of comfort and joy.

Last night I hauled out all our Christmas decorations (except the tree and banister garland - those go up next weekend), put on some holiday music, and while the P-Dawg made us a dinner of steak with roasted asparagus and mashed potatoes and the children played quietly afoot, I busted my decorating moves.

I put the time honored garland up on the fireplace, spending a healthy chunk of time positioning fake holly berries equidistantly from one another:



I fashioned a string of wire lights and two bendable berry garlands into a nest, and placed it at the foot of my fireplace:



I hung the festive, but migraine inducing jingle bells on the front doorknob:



Then I painstakingly set up the nativity scene, triangulating the three kings and the shepherd with his flock around the holy family in a tasteful and aesthetically pleasing manner:



Fifteen minutes and one visit from the little J-dog later, the statues looked like this:



Which is only right.

Finally, I reluctantly draped my old frenemy, the button-eyed reindeer quilt, over the back of the family room couch.



The quilt, which begs that a crystal candy dish full of Werther's Originals be placed next to it, was a wedding gift from a distant relative, who had lovingly sewn it herself. It's cute, but not my style, and this year as I sorted through the boxes in our basement, I had decided to leave the quilt behind.

Except that after I had turned my back on the quilt in favor of a box of funky Crate and Barrel ornaments, I could feel those insipid little button eyes boring into me.


"Don't do it, bish."

And so I didn't. I brought the quilt upstairs and while the kids played with Legos in the corner, I draped it over the back of the couch.

After dinner, we retired to the family room to relax and admire my handiwork. J-dog and V-meister were miraculously well-behaved and no quarreling or couch diving occurred. If there had been a fire in the grate and snow falling softly outside the windows, we would have been a scene straight out of a Thomas Kincaid painting.

It took only a few moments for the kids to notice that the reindeer quilt was up.

"REINDEER BUTTON QUILT, YAY!!!!!", they squealed while holding hands and jumping up and down.

The joy was palpable.

There was couch diving.

An angel choir began singing Handel's Messiah, and the spirit of Christmas alighted on my shoulder in the shape of a small red bird.

I'll never be able to diss the beady-eyed reindeer quilt - it might as well be a threadbare pair of Christmas mice.