Tag: #Christmas

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Festivals of Lights

The Kajmeister backyard has its own small but cheery arrangements.

Imagine you are a tiny speck attached to a giant rotating space ship, not spinning too fast for you to fall off, but enough so that you notice that things change in your environment. Sometimes, there is a nearby furnace with plenty of light and heat but you can’t get close to it all the time because of the spinning, so you have to plan your energy use carefully. Also, some time ago, way before you were born, the space ship was hit by a big rock, so hard that it tilted sideways, so now the whole thing is tilted and wobbly. Although it’s so big and you’re so small, you don’t really notice. EXCEPT! that when you’re on the side tilted toward the orb, it’s plenty warm but when you’re on the side tilted and wobbling away, it’s not always warm enough. You kind of count the hours until you start tilting toward the orb again.

That’s the Solstice. Happy Solstice.

We carbon-based lifeforms like our solar radiation, that light and warmth that’s much better when we’re tilted TOWARD and not away. We’ve been tilting away, but now, starting yesterday we started TOWARD again. Our ancestors liked this so much that culture after culture dragged giant stones up mountains, across logs, along ramps, just to put together towers big enough so that everybody knew when the space ship would start spinning toward the orb again.

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Under Wraps

Late Victorian era, photo from hhhistory.com.

Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things…

The extra-hard crossword puzzle contest this week courtesy of the WSJ is “Under Wraps,” so while I was pondering its solution, I started thinking about wrapping paper. I discovered, as I poked around sites which did addressed this topic (sponsored by Hallmark etc), that many had bits and pieces but none seemed to thread them together. You need the Victorians, you need the Flexography press, the toilet paper, the papyrus reeds, the red symbology of China, and the Roman army. Nobody mentioned them all. So let me rectify that gap.

I set out to answer two specific questions. First, when did we–Americans if you want to be specific–start decorating holiday gifts with colored wrapping paper and ribbons? And, secondly, how did cultures over time convey their gifts? Who started wrapping, when and how?

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Mom’s China

“I can’t find the rest of these crystal glasses,” KK says, lying on the kitchen floor, one arm buried deep in a cabinet. There are rattling noises, and she keeps shining her phone’s flashlight deep into the Underworld of our kitchenware. “This is all the Rosenthal stuff.”

Two pieces of the remaining Rosenthal set. All photos by kajmeister, exc. Wedgwood medallion.

My mom received a set of Rosenthal china as a wedding present. When she died in 1997, I ended up with it. Most of it I stored, but I kept a platter out among our other fancy buffet dishes. A few holidays ago, when it was pulled out for use, the platter cracked neatly in half, which has made me loathe to use any other pieces.

As we were making Thanksgiving turkey and trimmings this year, pulling out the special bowl to mix stuffing and another bowl to sport cranberries, I realized that there’s a big gap between what I would use for a dinner party and what my mom would use. Not that strange these days, of course, my kids would say, “dinner party, WTF?” But the idea of hauling out a single set of matching delicate dishes for a meal seems bizarre, even on a special holiday with people you care about.

There is a history for things like Rosenthal china, a company history and a personal history. These things intersect and create waves of overlapping interference, like in a pond. This may explain why we have such a patchwork quilt of dishes when we serve dinner, all of which are precious.

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