Sixty Wreaths on the Hill

We bundled up the way I used to bundle Josh. Two pairs of socks, and bread bags over the socks so the boots would slide on easy, and scarves wrapped twice around.

We went out the back door with three pairs of loppers, a pruning saw, and the old wooden toboggan that had hauled every one of my children up and down the ditch.

Inside the cedars it was quiet and blue-green and smelled like every December of my life.

The snow was only a few inches deep in there. The wind went over the top like a train that never came.

I showed them again what I show them every year. You take the low boughs, the ones that touch the ground.

You never take more than a third off any one tree. “Because a tree is a living thing,” Kenna said, before I could finish, “and it has to winter too.”

She had remembered it from last year, word for word. I could have hugged her.

Garland ran the loppers like a man felling timber, with his tongue out the side of his mouth.

Bernadine filled the toboggan in neat layers, all the tips pointing the same direction.

Kenna picked up every little sprig that fell, so nothing went to waste. Noble mostly fell down in the snow, and laughed, and got up, and fell down again.

By ten o’clock the back porch was stacked to the window with cedar. The whole house smelled like a church at Christmas, and the kids’ cheeks were as red as the ribbon.

Then we cleared the kitchen table and spread newspaper over it. I set out the paddles of green wire, the pruning shears, and a coffee can full of cut wire pieces.

“All right,” I said, and pushed up my sleeves. “Sixty. Let’s see what kind of a crew I’ve got this year.” And Garland said, “The best crew, Grandma,” and he meant it.

Here is how you make a cedar wreath, if you have never done it. You cut the boughs into pieces about as long as your hand. You gather three or four into a little bundle.

You lay that bundle on the ring and wrap the stems twice with the wire.

Then you lay the next bundle so it covers the stems of the first one, and you wrap it too.

You keep going around the ring, always in the same direction, until the last bundle tucks up under the first. Ten or twelve bundles makes a good full wreath.

It is not hard work, but it is slow. The pitch gets on your hands and will not come off with anything but butter.

By noon all five of us had sticky fingers and needles down our collars.

Bernadine and Garland cut the bundles. Kenna sorted them into piles by size, which nobody had asked her to do and which turned out to make everything go twice as fast.

I did the wiring. Noble was in charge of counting, and he took the job very seriously.

He sat on his knees on a chair at the end of the table and watched the stack by the door.

“That’s eleven,” he would say, every time I set a finished wreath on the stack. Then, a while later, “That’s twelve.” He was right every single time.

At half past eleven the back door opened and Verlie from the next place over came in, stamping the snow off her overshoes.