This year, I made some Christmas tree ornaments. Remnants of trees found their way into my collages. Tiny twigs, bark, seeds, pods, cones, pressed flowers were married with feathers, stamps, buttons, beads and snatches of writing. I glued these fragments onto pieces of paper shaped like old price tags. These collages are my year’s currency in memories and experience. And my beautiful pine Christmas tree is covered in them. I thought I’d had a fallow year. But the ornaments dangling from my tree tell another tale.
Elizabeth Hayes

Activity

Spend a few hours seeking twisted willow and other interesting fragments from trees. Place these in a vase, pull out your decorations and create a unique Christmas Tree this year.

Return to Advent Calendar

Tree Day 2004
A Tale Told in Haiku

Tall Oregon pine
Heavy silence fills it’s boughs
Soft snow filters down

This crepe-white Tree Day
A magical Christmas mist
Haunts the mystic wood

These three wise daughters
Shakespeare and Film forgotten
Run like little girls

Into the forest
Toward the pillowed dreamy trees
Seeking Tradition

Tall son dressed in black
Sugared by the sifting show
Vanishes in mist

Small dog bounds woodward
So fast he becomes a blur
Swimming Milky Snow

Whipping waves of wind
Close around silence once more
White mist swallows all

Winter coldly smiles
Soft, the Hunter speaks to wood
Evergreen is found

Harvested with joy
The Holly King in triumph
Is gathered by all

Cycle comes again
Dance from Solstice to Solstice
Life is woven here

And the children sing
And climb amid the branches
One more year of joy

~

And in the warm truck
Poet’s fingers drop her pen
Dreams of Christmas mist. . .

Edwina Peterson Cross ©November 28, 2004