No Place Like Gnome

Winter is coffee, tea, soups, and toast. Toast drenched in butter, swept to the edges and seeping into the heart of each slice. Flannel sheets. Soothing body butters anointing legs that will become parsnip pare under leggings and sweats.

Winter is comfort.

Winter is sniffles, tissues, the warmest slippers, and calculating which is best: going back to sleep for an hour or putting your sleep warmed feet on the cold floor and making that 4:00 AM bathroom run to pee?

Winter is choices.

Winter is The Great Clothing Swap’s finest moment: the resurrection of the Christmas clothes and the final, rueful, retiring of the last sundresses in the boxes and bins (‘Wouldn’t it make sense to mark the boxes this year?’ Well if course it would! But will we? Of course we will not!’) and stash them under the basement stairs until the need arises for February hearts and March shamrocks.

Winter is work.

Winter is lost faces and childhood mornings, promises made and broken, families and voices I no longer hear singing, prayers and wishes, longings flying from open boxes when my Pandora fingers ripped the ribbons off the future too hastily; Hope remaining behind, tasting sweet within my mouth, but just as elusive to recall.

Winter is memories.

Winter is popcorn in front of the fireplace, school plays (‘You know I’ll be there; look to your left about 10 rows back.’), church choir with Angels on High, shepherds on hills, and a Baby Away in a Manger, and one small vintage waxen baby, passed down through the family, under our tree.

Dad would unwrap it and arrange the tree skirt just so to nestle the child if was and history under our tree. Forbidden to touch it lest we scratch the beeswax limbs we took turns sneaking a sly caress of those chubby legs, sure we could feel them grow warm with our touch.

Winter is stories.

My family tree started four days after I became a wife at nineteen. We each had a few of ‘our’ ornaments we brought to the union, had both white and colored lights, and I made paper chains and strung jingling bells purchased at Woolworths on my lunch hour.

There was no crèche, no illuminated porcelain houses, no train looping around mountains of gifts. There was a pink sequined angel made from a 70’s Craft of the Month kit.

There was no waxen angel with dubious Olde Country provenance. No.

There was, however, The Gnome.

Purchased at Joseph Horne’s in Pittsburgh PA, The Gnome and his late, much lamented Other Gnome were much coveted gift tags that Christmas of 1979. The Book of Gnomes was published in the U.S. in 1977 and it became peak holiday decor and the theme for All Decorating in the Horne’s department store in which I worked.

My pay as employee cafeteria wench did not cover the many stuffed, beaded, plush, painted, and polished versions. But a gift tag or two? Those I could afford.

The Other Gnome, before he vanished (likely in a swirl of crumpled wrapping and ribbons, and after all - that isn’t a terrible way to go if one must, is it?) had long lost the ability to open into a teeny gift book and reveal the name of the giver. He had become a flat one-sided whisper of his former self.

But The Gnome? He is with me even now. Reinforced with wrapping tape, this year pierced with a twisted hanger, he is one of the last items I place on the tree.

Always, always, always- he’s there to the left, tucked toward the back.

He is Comfort: a tangible piece of innocence and the pull of belonging.

He is Choices: following me into a new life, purposefully packed among the many Barbies that last year when Ours became His and Mine.

He is Work: packed up in tissue, layered in boxes and bins, boosted into attics and cubbies, sought after among the bubble wrap and ancient pastel sheets of paper towels when The Tree is bedecked.

He is Memories: The Gnome has witnessed and kept counsel over my Winters. He’s sat with me as I endlessly rocked and nursed babies, as I sipped that mid-nighttime tea, as I crept in quietly from working the midnight sales, as I stuffed token chocolates into my own stocking because, well; that’s what Moms do when Santa forgets.

He is Stories: every plot I’ve ever plotted, every Equinox self-examination, wvery lap-told Christmas bed time tale, every New Year Resolution bravely written; he has witnessed them all.

My now husband got The Gnome, the Barbie’s, and me as a package deal on our first Christmas. He’s heard me crow with excitement when I find him amid the ornaments and coo with happiness when he is placed in his special spot among the needles.

I like to believe The Gnome is at home within the greenery. When I carefully applied the new tape and smoothed the pages of his inner book, I told him what I always say each year when I place him in the tree.

“There you go, my friend. There’s no place like Gnome.”