CHERISHED MEMORIES, UNWRAPPED EACH YEAR

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

They are just things and things shouldn't mean so much. But they do.

Most are old and many are broken. A musical clock, a plastic reindeer, a dime store manger, Santa at his desk, a faded ornament they all tug at me.

They are my relics and my genies, too, not trapped in bottles and dependent upon magic, but stored in boxes and wrapped up in newspaper. Unwrap them and people and moments from long ago are here again. No wishes necessary.

I know this just as Aladdin knew exactly what he'd get when he rubbed the lamp. And so I anticipate every Christmas as I lug up decorations from the cellar. I know that treasures await.

I unwrap a blue ornament that in its day was as shiny as sapphire, that used to hang on the Christmas trees my father brought home. It caught the light back then, reflecting the big, bright bulbs that everyone used red and orange and blue and green. And it caught my eye, too.

I look at it now and, along with the dust motes that flit in the sunlight (fairy dust, I told my kids, when they were young and we unwrapped these things together), I see my father busy, my mother happy, a wiry tree that smelled like the whole outdoors, and my old house, where music was always playing and the long days of winter were cozy and warm and safe.

A single ornament does all this.

I find a snowman in a globe at the bottom of a box and he's gray, not white, and the world he sits in is gray and the snow that falls around him clouds the glass. And when I wind him up "Frosty the Snowman" plays, but the notes are thin and slow.

Anyone would say, "That thing is old and broken. Throw it away." But the broken notes transport me back to the house where my mother lived after her accident. I see her sitting in the kitchen in her chair. I hear my father humming down the hall. I smell the coffee on the stove. And on the shelf between the kitchen and the dining room, I see this snowman new and perky and gleaming.

And for a moment I have a mother and father again.

More things, more memories.

A Woolworth's manger, two pieces of wood that barely fit together. It was my mother's, the only part left of her creche, the figures long gone. "Can I put Jesus in the cradle?"

"Yes, Baybo."

A Mr. & Mrs. Claus from Mammoth Mart, tree ornaments, small and made of wood. "Can I put them on the tree?" each of my children begged.

And they would place them, just so, and stand back and study them and smile.

An angel my husband brought from Nashville is at least 25. She's crushed and wobbly and not up to angel standards. But I dust her off and put her on the mantel anyway.

Christmas books with my children's names written in big print; Christmas books with my name written in big print. Photos of me with Santa and of my children with Santa and of their children with Santa. I unearth all these things. And they unearth something in me.

It's eternity that the genies bring. My father setting a tree in a stand. My husband setting a tree in a stand.

My childhood. My children's childhood. And now their children's childhood.

I unpack a ceramic Christmas clock that Father Coen gave me a few years before he died. It's a regift, he said, explaining. It drove him and everyone in the rectory crazy because it played a carol every hour on the hour, day and night. And it was loud. It never drove me crazy. I loved it from the start. I unwrap it, unscrew the back, insert a fresh battery, set the time, and wait for it to play.

And when it does, I sit and smile because I am certain, at least for now, that time and death really don't separate us from the people we love. That the old words are true that somewhere in the next room, around a corner, they are there watching and smiling and thinking of us, too.