I Dwell in Possibility. Toni McNaron

in a card accompanying the first bulb, which was called Black Orpheus.

      Though my mother’s talents for interior decoration were always in evidence, at Christmas time she outdid herself. A small touch that nonetheless delighted every child who came into our house was her wishbone tree. Mamie would buy the tiniest tree she could find at the YMCA lot, place it on a tier-top table in the living room, and hang on its delicate branches scores of gilded wishbones, saved from Sunday chickens and from the big hens she boiled up periodically for salad. All around this display were little boxes wrapped and bowed, each containing some bright trinket from the ten-cent store. Each child was allowed to select a wishbone from the tree and pull it with Mamie. The child who got the lucky piece took away a prize in one of the boxes. Those who got the unlucky piece received a handful of hard candies. Since Mamie seemed to enjoy the event as much as the children, everyone won.

      Aside from this small ornament to cheer up children, everything about our decorations was a major production. Our front door project involved hours of hard scratchy work. I was allowed to help, so I know what it entailed. Around the facing, Mamie hung a swag of long-needled pine cuttings, intertwined with lights. She made her own swags because none she saw was thick enough for her taste. During my high school and college years, she and I would sit on the kitchen floor for hours, securing small clumps of pine to fat rope by wrapping picture wire around the sprig and then tying that to the rope. These clumps were overlapped like roofing shingles, the end result being a thick mass of pine with no hint of a rope beneath. Once we had tacked the swag to the wooden frame of the door, it remained to lace strings of multicolored lights through that mat of greens. I soon grasped that the swags sold at tree lots or florists were sparser in order to make it easier to attach lights. But my mother knew that expediency did not always coincide with beauty, and she chose beauty every time.