You may wonder what mysterious occult ceremony requires cotton wool from Mamalie’s medicine cupboard, a knot of wire and the gardening shears which did not belong on his desk, matchsticks, a lump of clay. You, yourself may wonder at the mystery in this house, the hush in this room; you may glance at the row of children on the horsehair sofa and at the plaque of mounted butterflies, or at the tiny alligator, who is varnished and looks like a large lizard and whose name is Castor or whose name is Pollux, the children can not tell you for no one has been able to answer that question for them.
Castor and Pollux are, you may know, stars shining in the heavens, but though two or three of the children seated on this sofa watch their father go out of the house on clear evenings to look at the stars in his little observatory across the bridge up the side of the mountain, this Castor and Pollux are not thus Greek, they are not stars in the sky, they are not even a myth out of a later, more grown-up fairy book called Tanglewood Tales.
They have not yet read the Tanglewood Tales; Ida reads Grimm to some of them at night after they are in bed, temporarily three in a row in the same bed.
Castor and Pollux are two alligators; one is dead, true to the Greek myth which after all came from the older Egyptian layer of thought and dream. Castor is, shall we say, hibernating in the attic in his tank behind the wire netting. Pollux, shall we say, is mounted on an oval of beautifully varnished wood, a talisman, a mascot, an image — an idol even. Men worshipped crocodiles in the days when men’s minds were not more developed than the minds of this row of children.
Papalie is leading them out of Egypt but they do not know that. He is leading them to the Promised Land which is just around the corner, only a week or a few days, for this is part of Christmas. You may wonder what a lump of clay and matchsticks has to do with Christmas, but if you are a stranger in our town, you will be told, if you will wait quietly in the other room under the picture of Jedediah Weiss who is Mamalie’s father, who is dead. If you belong to the town, you will know all about Christmas, I mean the real Christmas with a putz under the tree. If you are a stranger, you will say, “What a funny word, I mean, I don’t understand,” and Mamalie will say, “Oh, it’s German but we never found another word for it.” If you are well-informed, you may say, “I suppose it derives from something.” “Putz-en,” Mamalie may say, “to decorate or to trim.”
It is part of the tree, the most important part, the children think. “It is what you put,” says Tootie, “I think; I think putz is what you put on the moss,” and they all laugh, for Tootie is very quick and clever, they say, not like the Professor’s children who are so quiet, but the Professor’s children do talk sometimes. Gilbert the oldest, who is two years older than Hilda, talks quite a lot and makes jokes. Once, walking on the mountains with Papalie, he saw an old goat that belonged to some of the shanty-people, as they called them, behind the mills. “Look, Papalie,” he said, “look at that goat, it looks like you, Papalie.”
Everybody told that story often; Gilbert was rather bored with it. He had said it when he was only a little boy, younger than Tootie even, who now said things they thought were quick and clever and cute. Papalie came back and told them the story. Hilda, who is the only girl, sitting between Gilbert and Tootie, wondered a long time about it. “Does he look like a goat, Mamalie?” Mamalie laughed and said, “It was just his white beard and maybe the way his hair curled over his ears.” Papalie’s hair is not like goats’ horns, but if you look and look at him, maybe he is like a goat. Hilda never thought it was so funny, though they always laughed and kept on telling it, though now Tootie said the funny things, like “Putz is a place where you put things under the Christmas tree.”
What he did was, he took his ivory paper-knife and cut off an edge of the lump of clay. The clay lay on the damp cloth, like the dough Ida mixed in our kitchen. He turned back the edges of the cloth around the clay. He took the clay in his hands and rolled it, like Ida makes a biscuit. He pulled at one end, and you knew exactly that it would not look like a sheep. But when he jabbed two points in the face and drew a line for a mouth with the handle of his pen, you knew exactly what it was; it was eyes and a sheep-mouth, though it would not show very much until he had finished several sheep and put them aside to dry.
Afterwards, he would ink in the eyes with black ink and draw a little line in red ink for the mouth. What he did was, he made several sheep like that in a row, like Ida’s biscuits on the kitchen table.
He pulled the cotton wool into little puffs and stuck the puffs of wool on the sheep. But first he stood them up on legs, that is what the matchsticks were for, and the burnt-out ends of the matchsticks were the sheep’s hooves. He made small sheep too, those were the lambs, and at the end, he made one large sheep. This was the special moment. He cut off bits of wire from the small coil of wire, he bent the wire into shape, he stuck in the wire horns. All this time, we were sitting on the sofa. The sheep stood up on their match-stick legs, but he would not put in their faces until they were quite dry.
He also had little pointed bits of stiff paper which he had inked red for their ears. That is what he did. Later, before we went to bed, when we were a bit older, say, two years older, Mama would get down the old boxes of Christmas-tree things from the attic and open them on the dining room table. From inside the crinkled faded tissue paper that a glass ball was wrapped in, there would come a sort of whisper, and a sprinkling of tiny old dead pine needles would fall on the table, from last year’s tree.
We carefully unwrapped the balls, not remembering, hardly remembering anything of what had happened last Christmas but how under the carpet, it would be impossible, even if you wanted to, to shut out the “thing” that the fallen pine needles on the table conjured up; there was the moment when it began to happen, when indeed it had happened; that was not the exact moment when the boxes were set down on the table, not even the moment that Mama unknotted the old bit of red ribbon fastened round the flat somewhat-battered cardboard box that had cardboard compartments for the separate glass balls. The compartments were not full, for some glass balls were always broken, but we would go to the five-and-ten and get some more balls, some more silver or gilt lengths of trimming, as we called it, though it was all trimming.
On the table, we made separate heaps of the things; the glass balls in their open box were gone over, like toys in a toy-hospital. It was this special moment when Mama said, “See if you can find the end of an old candle, Sister, among the paper cornucopias,” that the “thing” began.
The “thing” could not begin if there were not an old end or several almost burnt-out stumps of last year’s beeswax candles. Whoever untrimmed the tree never forgot those candle-ends. It had to be the beeswax candles, the special candles that were used for the children’s Christmas Eve service; the red and pink and blue and green five-and-ten boxes of candles could be seen all the year round, at home or anywhere, on anybody’s birthday cake.
But this was another sort of birthday; it was, of course, exactly, the birthday of the Child in the manger, in whose honor we had arranged the sheep on the moss, yet it was something else, indefinable yet deeply personal, something our perception recognized though our thought did not then relate our Child to the other Holy Children, His racial or spiritual or mythological predecessors. We arranged the sheep on the moss, but we did not think of Amen-Ra or the Golden Fleece, or even Abraham and Isaac. We gathered the moss ourselves, on trips to the mountains, or Uncle Hartley or Uncle Bob would make an excuse to get the moss for us. “Helen, all the thick moss has been pulled off the rocks for miles around, it’s too far for the children.” If it were a snowy December, the aunts and uncles might hire a sleigh and go off together and come back, screaming and laughing, with bunches of mountain laurel. Fir trees and pine and the laurel bough, We are twining in wreathes to greet thee now.