Welp. Content update is beyond sporadic. But I'd be remiss if I didn't post the Christmas letter here. So here goes!
Christmas 2023
Dear Everyone:
We just got our twentieth Christmas ornament last month. Not in total -- we have a lot more than twenty, including the Big Bird that hung on my childhood tree and the probably haunted jingle elf that hung on Jennifer's. I mean that it's our twentieth art glass Christmas ornament, hand-blown (mouth-blown?) by Terry Bloodworth and Springfield Hot Glass Studio.
Many of you know Terry. The rest of you are impoverished, and while I pity you poor jerks, you're going to have to settle for the basics for now. He is, for those of you who are bereft, a glassblower, an artist, and was the elder statesman of the downtown Springfield, Missouri independent arts scene for many years.
Then he decided he had done his time running a shop, closed it up, and spent the next few years making things and selling them in shops and art shows here and there. This was sad, because it meant an end to visiting his shop during the holidays, walking from a near-freezing street into a place warmed by furnaces that were running at what I'd estimate to be 46% of the operating temperature of a fusion reactor. You'd walk in bundled under three layers and leave with a rare case of holiday swampass. It was lovely.
Not as lovely as his work, of course. I said that Terry's an artist, and I meant it. We have quite a few pieces of his around the house: vases, drinking glasses, even the shade for the pendant light fixture over the kitchen sink. His work has increased our home's Aesthetic Charm Numerical Estimate (ACNE) by at least 24%.
And then there's Christmas. Jennifer and I decided, not long after we married, that we'd buy one ornament from him every Thanksgiving to put on our tree to commemorate another year of marriage. We bought more than that, of course, candy canes and penguins and gnomes (gnomes are elf-adjacent) and gifts for family and friends. But the one thing we looked forward to the most was picking out that year's Terry Ornament. Even after the shop closed, we continued to make arrangements to buy them.
We've got 'em in all shapes and sizes. Glass balls, of course, and teardrop shapes, one that's over a foot long and somewhat horn-shaped, and another equally long, twisted affair that came from a gorgeous, chaotic chandelier that he deconstructed and sold the pieces from when he closed the shop.
We used to hang them on the main tree, but then came the Great Gravity Kerfuffle of 2011: too many ornaments on the front side, a tree stand that was too anemic for the job, and...boom.
Two things came out of that: First, we bought an absurdly expensive tree stand that was worth every penny, because it's built like a Sherman tank and an absolute dream to put a tree in. Second, we bought a separate tree-shaped metal table-top stand to showcase the Terry Ornaments, which I backlit with LED strips. When it filled up, we bought a second, less amazing stand. I've seriously considered learning TIG welding just to make a new one that would hold everything and look like something a wizard would use to air-dry his underwear. Terry's work deserves no less.
We got ornament number twenty just a few weeks ago. Twenty-one, I guess, technically. We had to replace one that broke in the fall. But this last one was free. He sent it to us with his love and good wishes, because it's the last ornament of his that we'll ever get.
His retirement is complete, now, you see. He's done. He's earned it. But I haven't forgiven him. That he would cut us off like this is selfish bordering on cruel, mitigated only somewhat by his coincidental decision to end on a nice, round number.
Twenty years. God, when you say it like that.
Twenty years of kids and dogs, neighbors we'd kill for and others we'd choke the life out of. Twenty years of hiking trails and fording creeks, of fights and holding hands, of funerals, weddings, hospitalizations and bedtime farts. Twenty years.
Our son's driving cars and picking out universities. Our daughter's starting to learn how to traverse the minefield of womanhood. I am still bald. Outside of some musculoskeletal issues, Jennifer's holding up well, and we're starting to look toward new adventures for the next 20 years. But we commemorated the ending of each of the last twenty with melted sand that was colored and forged and inflated and spun and twisted and drawn into something that brings us light every dark winter.
Thich Nhat Hanh, one of my favorite teachers, used to make a point of emphasizing that everything is made out of things that aren't it. Take you, for example. You are made entirely out of non-you elements, he would say. You are made out of your parents, and their parents, and on back past the beginning of our species. You are made of dinners and hasty breakfasts and naps and coffee and other people's exhalations. Hell, it's almost a statistical certainty that every time you breathe in, you are inhaling at least one molecule of Julius Caesar's dying breath. You're partly made of Julius Caesar, or at least his bloody, dying coughs. Merry Christmas!
And I think of that when I look at these ornaments. Some probably have his (arguably cooked) skin or hair cells folded into the glass. They contain his literal breath, preserved for us like a mosquito in amber. But more than that, they're made out of his eagerness, his frustrations, his worry, his sleep, his need to forget whatever was whirring around inside his brain that day and focus on the work. They're made out of his wife and children, some of the finest people we have ever had the good fortune to love. So every year, for twenty years, we'd pick out a piece of Bloodworth to display in our dining room and say goodbye to another year of that terrifying lifeline we call Family.
Then he cut us off, the selfish bastard. But no, it's fine, we're fine, it's all fine.
FINE.
It's another reminder from my teacher. Nothing is permanent, but nothing ever dies either. It just transforms into something else. The leaf on the tree becomes the leaf on the ground becomes nutrients in the soil that make new leaves. And in the same way, because Terry is now dead to us--
I'm kidding. Seriously, though, it means that we will find a new way to mark another fall's end. I have no idea what that will be, but I do know that it will be anchored in our lives and in the people we love, the people who change us, the people we are made from, because we are made from the Bloodworths, as we are made from all of you, and you from us. With a little patience, we'll find what pieces of you we want to hang from our tree.
But not in a weird way.
Happy Holidays. And, as always, we are here.
