How a family dealt with loss during the holidays
By Carolyn Foote Edelmann
One Christmas, our girls unexpectedly lost both grandmothers within six weeks. The following year, we had to leave our Princeton home and yard and all our usual Holiday rituals. There was no way we could sit around our festive table, site of not one, but two empty places.
My husband Werner, being Swiss, decided that two weeks at a Swiss ski lodge in New Hampshire would feel like Christmas and keep our minds off sadness. The girls and I agreed, and yet, and yet…
How could it be Christmas anywhere else? Without two fireplaces and two trees — one formal, one rustic — for which they and I had made many of the ornaments? Without the girls singing and playing old and modern carols on their guitars for Moms and Nana? Without the special music rituals of Princeton, like the Messiah sing-along, and always Nutcracker at Lincoln Center? White tights and Mary Janes, holding a grandmother’s hand? Without friends of many ages at our hearth? But we were too sad to stay home.
It’s Christmas Eve. We’re in a tiny rustic restaurant, downhill from Pfosi’s Lodge in the White Mountains. Our table is next to a living birch tree, whose branches go up into the open dark sky. Except it’s not so dark — it’s full of stars, and now starry snowflakes sift in through the opening, and along the bright trunk, delighting the girls. On the way back to the car, we were fascinated at the separateness of those glinting flakes, arriving and arraying themselves like gems on Tiffany velvet along ski jacket sleeves.
It’s Christmas card snow as we drive to the wooden church with its requisite pointy steeple, for midnight mass. It was odd to clunk into church in our winter boots, but all the locals looked just like us. Two tiny pots of poinsettias punctuated wide steps leading to the compact wooden altar. You could believe in a savior in a manger, when you looked at an altar like that. An organ wheezed. Above our heads, choir members clustered like a wreath around the busy organist. The women surged eagerly into song, —the old songs, the kind my mother used to sing to us. “Away in A Manger,” “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” — those songs. The ladies’ voices cracked but they, were so earnest and joyful.
Leaving the ceremony, everyone’s ski jackets began to crinkle and whisper with cold. As locals and strangers wished “Merry Christmas,” puffs of breath hung in the night air.
Driving uphill in continuing flakes, we marveled at that darkness. Apart from light spilling from church windows onto new snow, there wasn’t any brightness anywhere. The girls hummed carols in the back seat. Werner and I began to think this might work.
Entering Pfosi’s Lodge, Paul grinned as he wished us Merry Christmas in Swiss — which sounded like Froliche Weinachten, (froy-likka vie-nakten). It worked.
The Swiss were ever delighted to encounter our half-Swiss little girls, with that telltale bright blonde hair. In their country, Swiss women would sing/song, “Die schoene maitili, Die schoene maitili!” (dee schuna mytalee) to Diane and Catherine. That meant, “the beautiful little maidens.” I’m not sure how old they were at Pfosi’s when Paul was so pleased to find them. The girls didn’t yet come up to our shoulders.
Whole trees snapped and crackled in Paul’s enormous fireplace. The air was fragrant, as in childhood when we all raked leaves and made bonfires. Real pine boughs from Pfosi’s hillsides decorated that wood-carved lobby, lending their own spice. There was an enormous copper kettle, filled with fresh-cut greens. The kettle was the kind used to make Emmenthaler. We had watched that process in that town when the girls were 7 and 8. “Those kettles were so big,” they wrote their grandmothers that afternoon, “we all could have climbed in for a bath.” How that copper gleamed in the Christmas Eve firelight!
Our boots resounded down the slender hall, as we went to our rooms. We heard squeals of delight from Diane and Catherine’s room. They were discovering not only wrapped Swiss chocolate candies on their pillows (ours, too), but also the very kind of Swiss Christmas cards we would be opening if we were home — Very white and crisp, scalloped (deckled?) edges, often gilded. Darling scenes of Swiss villages, and tiny green writing, almost like handwriting, with Swiss words to bless our Christmas and our New Year’s. Werner would read them out loud with his strongest Swiss accent. At home they’d be signed by Tante Li und Onkel Joni and Cousin Vera and the rest — all deprived of Werner’s mother by last year’s unexpected death. And all devoted to the girls. Here, the cards were not only from Paul Pfosi and his family, but separate ones from our Swiss ski instructors of the few preceding days.
A little later, there were again delighted cries from the girls’ room. “Come quick! Come see!” We dashed in, “flung open the window, threw up the sash — and what to our wondering eyes should appear” but a real sleigh and no reindeer, right under Diane and Cathy’s window. Steam curled from the horses’ backs and flanks. Snow trickled and danced, each flake lit like a star. In the sleigh were people who lived up there, all in their ski clothes in the middle of the night. They wore long scarves flung back, like Hans Brinker, and hand-made knit wool caps. They began caroling, and they knew all the words. So were we taught, “Christmas is a moveable feast.”
The next year, it was every bit as hard to imagine Christmas in our home without Nana and Moms. Others have admitted, in their own losses, a strange phenomenon — as though the dead were playing hide and seek. And we want to say, “It’s OK, you can come back now.” But they don’t.
So we went away again. Werner chose a new riverside condo in old Aspen for this flight from memories. It had a fireplace, which he had to feed and feed because western wood was not hardwood like home. Even the girls could carry armloads of wood in to our temporary hearth. Colorado snowflakes, beginning with nightfall, would bedeck those long blonde tresses as they trudged in with logs for their daddy.
Our Aspen living room held the crookedest tree any of us had ever seen. Diane insisted, “It makes Charlie Brown’s look like the cream of the crop.” Cath declared that its trunk said “W” for Werner. We didn’t have a tree stand, so this pine simply leaned against a corner. We made the ‘snow’ for the bottom out of a white bath towel.
The woman who cleaned for us in Princeton had worried about our being without a Christmas tree yet again. She’d given me a light package to tuck in my suitcase, “for your tree.” Betty had crocheted crochet strings and strings of red yarn, echoing the cranberries with which we would garland blue spruces in our Princeton backyard. White strings, of course, were the popcorn garlands we hadn’t made this year. Betty had also crocheted winter creatures — snowmen, evergreens (straight ones), antlered reindeer. They even had yarn ties so we didn’t have to find ornament hooks.
The girls and I were decorating this unlikely specimen on Christmas Eve. Werner was driving back to give cash to the tree men in their pick-up truck halfway to Snowmass. He’d run out of funds, what with all the costs of that day on the mountain. Those tree men of course couldn’t take credit cards and wouldn’t accept a check. They did let Werner bring the tree and the girls and me back into Aspen, and return with easy money.
But when he came back into the living room, Werner looked perplexed. Finally, we tugged out his story: “There weren’t any trees left on their truck,” he began, slipping out of jacket and gloves. “They seemed to be in a big hurry. In fact, they took off like a shot!” Then silence.
Catherine solved the mystery in our midst: “Dad, we have a kidnapped tree!”
We didn’t know whether this was funny or tragic, but it didn’t really matter, because we were helpless with laughter. There was something so terribly Western about it all. A purloined Christmas tree certainly didn’t connect with the grandmothers we had lost.
In Aspen, we could walk to whichever restaurant each night. So we put on our white blouses and long skirts, and Werner a special sweater. There were new after-ski-boots for the girls who had grown. Off we went, still laughing, into the snowy, snowy night. Somewhere behind us, bells pealed.