My little one came to me in tears.  She’d been playing with the Christmas ornaments even though I repeatedly explained they were not toys.  She said she was so sorry; that she’d broken one and put it in the recycling.  I asked her which one and discovered it was from the first Christmas Burk and I spent married.  I had never had a house and I’d had my new last name put on it.  She was sobbing and I told her that even though she should not have been playing with them I knew it was an accident.  I went to the recycling expecting to find it shattered.  Instead I was surprised to find most of it intact.  As we go through life, all of us have little pieces of ourselves that get broken for one reason or another.  It’s how we choose to deal with them that makes or breaks us.  Feminist writer Virginia Woolf said, “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”  Sometimes a lot of shattered fragments make a beautiful mosaic.  Or we can sweep them under the rug and pretend nothing ever got broken.  Our little ornament is still salvable.  I told her I was so proud of her for coming to me and telling me.  I think it is a testament to her character that she owned up to it, didn’t try to put the blame on anyone else, and told the truth.  I feel guilty to this day because I broke Mama and Daddy’s wedding cake topper and blamed it on the cat; poor Snowflake.  As this year closes I am trying to gather broken pieces of my own mostly because it has been a year since Mama has been gone.  I realize at least I have some; they just need to be repurposed into the mosaic of my life and my daughter’s.  We will always miss her, but brightly colored pieces of her that cannot be dimmed still shine their way through.  I will not let them fade with the passing of time.  And this mosaic will become part of others in the years to follow.  It already carries strong pieces of a Choctaw matriarch I never knew.  Then came pieces so elegant from my Grandmother Maris.  Daddy’s pieces have been the most prevalent, carrying wisdom, positivity, and perseverance.  Now Mama has added her own funny ones, soft ones, and beautiful ones and rather than try and bury them I choose to gather them all up and wrap them about me like a patchwork quilt.  The mosaic of my daughter has already started.  I think it carries seeds of greatness as its foundation.  From my side alone she has inherited the blood of French royals, Choctaw spirit and Irish fire.  And so our little ornament cannot hang anymore but it still exists; altered but standing.  It does not stand defeated, rather it stands open, proudly full of the memories from its past with room and hope for those yet to come.

Yesterday’s old school game post got me to thinking about the modern game I currently enjoy playing.  It all pretty much started around the time I got pregnant.  I would get up in the middle of the night frequently and couldn’t get back to sleep.  And so I dove into the equivalent of Scrabble with strangers on my iPhone.  I loved playing with this one guy from heaven only knows — New Zealand maybe — because it was day where ever he was and it would be about three in the morning my time.  The guy always beat me!  It was brutal losing EVERY time.  After a certain point I think he moved on to more cerebral waters.  I have some regulars with whom I usually have a game going.  Some are friends I know in person and some I’ve been lucky enough to meet through Facebook.  I’ve only tied twice and I have shamelessly posted a screenshot of my highest scoring word above.  I’m still trying to top that.  I’ve also been trying my hand at playing in French which has been VERY humbling.  As in I believe the gentlemen with whom I was playing might have thought I wasn’t firing on all cylinders.  Still, I enjoy the challenge of playing with people who are better in the hope that I will become better, too.  Tennis great Rafael Nadal said, “My motivation and aspiration is the same, being number one or being number five.  So that’s the truth.  And my goal is the same – it’s to always be happy playing, it’s to enjoy the game and improve always.”  He’s a bigger person … I want to be number one!  😉

When I was four I remember getting this game for Christmas.  I think I must have played it a thousand times with my parents.  I have never cared for math but always loved counting.  When I saw it in a catalog I jumped to buy it.  I had no idea they still made it!  Four years of waiting to be able to play games like this with Maris made this my greatest Christmas gift yet.  We played five rounds tonight and the last was an epic battle to see who would win as we were tied two to two.  The goal is to pick all your cherries off the tree but if the spinner winds up on the overturned bucket you have to put them all back.  I had forgotten about the dog and the bird that make you take two cherries out of your bucket if you land on them.  Maris shrieked with glee as she quickly won the first two rounds.  She lost the third and was incredibly gracious saying, “Good job Mama!”  When I was her age I’d cry when I lost.  We had no screens of any sort — no iPads, no television, and no iPhones.  Just a slowness of time sitting around the table.  It was déjà vu and a cycle of life continuing.  Author C. JoyBell C. said, “Life is a bowl of cherries.  Some cherries are rotten while others are good; it’s your job to throw out the rotten ones and forget about them while you enjoy eating the ones that are good!  There are two kinds of people:  those who choose to throw out the good cherries and wallow in all the rotten ones, and those who choose to throw out all the rotten ones and savor all the good ones.”  I try to cherry pick the good.

When most people think of Christmas, they think red and green.  For me it has always been blue and white.  We have a silver tree with dark blue “swag” that perpetually sways drunkenly because we have cats.  This was the first year my little girl helped me decorate the tree.  Every place we have traveled we always buy a Christmas ornament as a souvenir.  And so I explained to her where we brought this or that and she was delighted.  I know she will come to cherish them even more as she grows older.  It is like revisiting our trips with the placing of each bauble.  As she carefully helped me arrange the ornaments I thought it was no small coincidence that the first one she chose was Notre Dame — the place in which she took her first steps alone.  A Cafe du Monde ornament from New Orleans is hanging next to a trolley car from San Francisco.  A couple in a gondola dangles next to the Eiffel Tower, representing our honeymoon in Venice and Paris.  There is a Santa holding a cactus from Phoenix from the first trip Maris ever took.  Of course our tree has primarily wolf ornaments.  Some of my most beloved we got in Alaska, Quebec, and Santa Fe.  My very favorite ornament I chose to post.  I just cherish him and bought him a long time ago when I was single.  American author Louis L’Amour said, “No memory is ever alone; it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.”  And so I see our Christmas tree as a tangible display of our life’s intangible treasures — yet another wonderful thing about Christmas.  At the top of our tree is a starfish from Florida.  Ave Maris Stella; Hail Star of the Sea.  So deck the halls one and all, y’all, and be blessed.