The Ties That Bind

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Robert Frost

When I was young in the years after WWII, military families were caught in a weird vortex of the American social hierarchy. Soldiers home from the front often had unique and cutting edge technical knowledge and experience, aligning them with members of the middle to upper classes, but their pay scales reflected more nearly the income of social groups much closer to society’s lower strata of financial measurement. Balancing the characteristics of those two worlds was often a precarious tightrope walk with some very eccentric casualties.

One of those casualties involved family traditions. Because my dad was an Air Force officer, he owned his own “mess dress” uniform, a kind of tuxedo with the added splendor of medals–which were awarded for serious combat valor–decorating his jacket. He pulled the uniform out of the closet for dinners with the high command which were every bit as formal as a multi-course meal at Downtown Abbey. And because my dad also PhD in Educational Psychology, he understood the value of traditions in unifying families for the long haul. So he was always trying to merge formal tradition with limited income. Which is how I learned to elope.

He took several anthropology classes as part of his doctoral program where he studied, among other things, centuries old traditional rites of passage ceremonies to signify a young person’s transition to adulthood. My dad, who had a wicked sense of humor, decided I needed just such an official demarcation from childhood to adulthood. So when I was sixteen, he bought me a cheap suitcase and a short ladder. He put ladder outside my bedroom window and had me practice carrying my suitcase down the steps to sneak out of the house just in case, down the road, he didn’t approve of my marital choice. (Good News—my future husband had a college degree, so we avoided the whole “escape” scenario.)

The conflict between cash and social status became all the more acute during the holidays. Some of our military friends dragged huge boxes of Christmas decorations from one assignment to another so they could fill their homes with what they deemed were appropriate celebrations for a family of their position in society. My mother came from a modest background in a tiny Nevada community which no one who wasn’t born there has ever heard of. She thought it was inefficient to bother with stuff we only used a couple of weeks a year. That conflict was resolved to all parties’ satisfaction when we moved to Kirtland Air Force Base.

We were assigned officer’s housing on base. Turned out several of our neighbors were early astronauts. At the time, medical testing relating to space travel was done at Lovelace Clinic—down the street from the base. For all the neighborhood kids, those space jocks were the epitome of superheroes—and we got to sit at their tables, eat peanut butter sandwiches, and listen to men talk in real terms about adventures no one in history had ever faced before. At the local schools every classroom had models of the solar system hanging above us. it was exhilarating.

Even the base exchange was selling Christmas ornaments which were “space” themed. My dad, the inveterate and curious shopper in the family, simply couldn’t resist. He bought a couple of dozen of them. My mom was not thrilled with such an oddball assortment added to the handmade and heirloom decorations she’d collected over the years. What to do? What to do?

Once again, my dad’s sense of humor rose to the occasion. He tied a string of white thread and one of my mother’s sewing straight pins to the end of each “space” ornament and hung them at random on the living room ceiling. As I recall, my mother stood watching with her arms folded and a frown on her face. She later admitted that it did look seriously festive for Saturn and Mercury to be swinging gently in the air flow from the heater vents.

We kids loved it! So did our space addict friends. For the couple of weeks before Christmas a steady stream of kids, teenagers, whole families, even a real astronaut who lived two doors down from us came to check out our Space Christmas Ceiling. It became a cherished family tradition.

Once I married, Christmas wasn’t official until the ceiling was aglow with shining, spinning ornaments—now less directly space oriented, chosen simply for the delight of their appearance. In her early teens Daughter #1 bought a couple of snowflakes to add to our collection. She liked the idea of no two snowflakes being exactly alike, so she brought home snowflakes from Alaska, Israel (yes it snowed a couple of inches in Jerusalem while she and Son # 3 were there on a semester abroad), Kenya, Sweden, even China. Then her friends began to compete to find original snowflakes as gifts for her from wherever they were in the world. Now our Christmas ceiling boasts close to 150 twisting, sparkling, even whimsical gems of design and beauty.

My dad passed away almost 20 years ago, but when his great grandchildren spend an afternoon unpacking and suspending the graceful collection above us, the family text string boasts “the snowflakes are up”, and Christmas has officially began. Somewhere just above the roof, I’m pretty sure my dad is smiling.