Christmas is a season of remembering. The older we become the more we work to recall those earliest memories that have grown fuzzy and faded over time. As I watched the local evening news this week, every night included the weatherman’s predictions for snow and if we’d have a White Christmas in central North Carolina. He explained that for it to be considered a “White Christmas” there had to be 1 inch of snow on the ground Christmas Day. I remembered a picture of me in a box of old black and white photos. It had to be at Christmas because I was holding my new doll who walked and talked. Can’t remember what I named her but I sure loved that doll 🙂

I found the photo with 1962 stamped on it. I searched the recorded snowfalls for central North Carolina and found there was .80″ fall on Dec. 25, 1962–just shy of the required one inch, but a White Christmas, nevertheless, in my picture and my memory.

My Christmas memories include special times with my Aunt Polly. She came back East to live with us in the family home place when I was in 5th grade. During the few years that she stayed with us, we enjoyed blackberry picking in the summer and gathering pine and cedar at Christmas. She told me stories about when she’d been living in Denver and attended art classes at the university. I never saw any of her paintings until the Christmas before she died. The painting that I told her I loved was given to me. She’d painted it for her mother in December of 1954. Grandma Rosser died on Dec 23rd–before Polly was to be home for Christmas when she’d give her mother the painting.

Recently, when I was going through those old pictures, I found a copy of my grandmother’s obituary. I didn’t realize until I read it that she was 69 when she died–the same age as me. Life is much different now for a 69-year-old woman than it was in 1954.

When I checked the White Christmases that we’d had in central NC during my lifetime, a second one had occurred when I was fourteen and a freshman in high school; we had a snowfall of 1.10″ of on December 25, 1969. In the winter of my senior year, we had a greater amount of snow that shut down our school for a week—which wasn’t hard to do in the South with limited snow equipment. While I was at home and bored, I’d taken an interest in learning to embroider–which hardly seemed like me. My Aunt Polly showed me how to do the stitches and seemed please that I saw the beauty in that craft. I found that I could lose myself, hiding out in our living room and listening to the stereo, working on my project late into the night.

In the past year, I’ve returned to embroidery. There’s something satisfying about working with your hands, feeling the texture of the cloth and seeing the beauty of the design formed stitch by stitch. Once I’m into the work, I’m back into the rhythm of letting go of everything else and focusing on that simple act of sewing– I can lose myself.

The Santa I recently completed is a type of embroidery called Redwork. I bought the kit in a needlework store in Old Salem three years ago and finally got back to it. I was charmed by its simplicity and the easy stitches that don’t require counting or constantly referring to a graph–making it something I can do and watch a movie or listen to a podcast.

Wikipedia describes it like this: “Redwork is a form of American embroidery, also called art needlework, that developed in the 19th century and was particularly popular between 1855 and 1925. It traditionally uses red thread, chosen because red dyes were the first commercially available colorfast dyes, in the form of Turkey red embroidery floss.”

Now, seeing the Santa beside the pottery vase of fresh pine and cedar reminds me of Aunt Polly — collecting greens from our woods and learning embroidery stitches during a winter snow. It’s reassuring to carry these things from my past into my present.

I wonder what memories you hold dear from your childhood? What holiday decorations old or new bring you joy? Do you have a craft that you can lose yourself in, one that may bring you enjoyment on a long winter night?

I wish you a Wonderful Holiday Season,

Connie