SOUTH ORANGE, NJ - Christmas comes in all shapes and sizes, as do Christmas trees. For the Lazen family of South Orange, recently returned from a year in Mexico, this year’s season echoes with memories of watching and participating in a very different, far less commercial holiday. "We ran away to escape the economy," Mother Cate, explained. "Mark lost his job, we didn’t want to blow through our savings, and we were tired of the cultural and economic crisis." Their solution – rent their house and spend a year in Mexico, retooling and recharging.
By and large their trip was a huge success. There was none of the frantic running around, shopping and buying, Cate recalls. Whatever you had or used, you made yourself or you purchased from those who did. Or you were creative and made do. For example, throughout the year as well as during Christmas, 9-year old Evelyn often played with discarded bits of wire, which could be found lying around in the streets. She would be quite happy with the imaginings their shapes conjured up, just as most of us are when we gaze at the clouds.
In San Miguel de Allende - http://tiny.cc/dNOnI -, where they lived, Christmas was celebrated with a procession in which Mary, great with child, rode thru the streets on a donkey looking for a place to stay because there was no room at the inn. People turned their vestibules into incredible "homages" with flower petals, grasses, and rice. Neighbors, friends and family visited here and there to admire one another’s handiwork. And Evelyn got to participate in the reenactment in her school’s production – she was a sheep – even though it was not a religious school.
Wonderful memories, all. But the year eventually came to an end, and back once more in her South Orange kitchen, the arts and crafts minded Cate found herself randomly tearing a Whole Foods bag into strips, folding the edges and rolling them into little inch-or-so-sized wheels that looked at bit like pastries. "Why did I do such a weird thing?" she mused. "I guess I feel a little bit of a need to escape the holiday scene. I found it refreshing in Mexico – they have meals with one another, and there’s nothing to buy – just tourist trinkets. This year," she said, "with calls from the children wanting this electronic device and that electronic device, I began cutting out pieces of paper over and over again – as a little bit of retaliation." Then, when she focused on what she was doing, Cate realized that those little paper wheels could be glued together and she thought… How about making them into a tree?
The founder of Arts Unbound http://www.artsunbound.org/home.htm - an educational non-profit which supports artistic achievement among adults, youths and seniors living with disabilities, Cate went with the idea, which had the following advantages: there would be no chopping down of a living tree, the bags would be reused and recycled, and the family could participate.
But, as she began in earnest to create the strips, fold them and roll them up – she was greeted with less than enthusiasm by her children and husband who wanted to know when they were going to get their real tree, and if this seemingly senseless project would mean that other important Mom activities such as doing the laundry and making dinner would be impacted. "When we were in Mexico" she said, "nobody had Xmas trees. Wanting to connect w/ their home and customs in the US, they’d managed to get hold of a hideous, red plastic tree and had created the ornaments for it themselves out of American cereal boxes, wrapping them with yarn for further decorative effect.
"American cereal was one comfort the kids had a hard time doing without," she said. "So we went to a specialty store to buy Honey Bunches of Oats and Fruit Loops and all kinds of things that bad Mothers give their children. We paid a lot of money for their beloved American cereal so we made all the ornaments out of the boxes including the star for the top. It may have been a hideous tree, but it was a wonderful experience," she recalled. "We’ve lost so much in this country by moving away from creating things ourselves. And now, with schools shutting down their art departments, children often have no opportunity at all to experience what it feels like to create or the total involvement of making something and sharing it with others. They are losing out on what is not only a completely engaging and often joyous experience; a bonding experience is also being lost. If you don’t get to experience the joy of making something; if you don’t know what it is to feel that way and it’s not part of your childhood experience, why would you do it as an adult?"
In this case though, as Evelyn, her brothers, Max and Jacob, and her husband Mark saw the tree coming together, they began to get excited, too. Now they would come home from school and immediately ask how the tree was getting on. And they talked about it to their friends which caused neighbors to drop in with extra Whole Foods bags, as well as a few thrown in from Trader Joes which had just opened a branch nearby. This was very helpful because she couldn’t just go to the store to get new bags, she explained. The idea was they had to be recycled. Between the bags brought over by neighbors, and by her Mom, who lives in West Orange, and by her sister who lives in South Orange, she managed to pull together the 100 plus bags (3 strips to a bag) that it turned out were needed to complete the tree which now stands 4 plus feet high give or take a slump here and there.
"The imagination muscle needs to be kept exercised kept strong," she noted. "I like the idea of celebrating Christmas with something that you didn’t buy in stores, creating something out of nothing. People come here just to look at my silly tree. They just ring the bell. It really started as a joke," she said: "Would Mommy really be able to make a tree? Now that it is a tree, they like it and don’t want it to go away. I haven’t been to the Mall, not once. I haven’t put lights up on the house! I’ve just been making little paper coils. I guess this is an attempt to keep lessons learned in Mexico alive in our hearts and minds.
But there is one thing she would like to do. Because she wishes she had the money to do more for Arts Unbound, now that this tree has been made from Whole Foods grocery bags, she is planning to approach them with an offer: The tree will be theirs if they will make a donation to Arts Unbound. In the opinion of this writer, this is a very good idea. In fact, next year tree-making could be a planned Whole Foods event - http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com.
PS – Mark has a wonderful new job.
To contact Cate Lazen email: catelazen@gmail.com
Jacqueline Herships is a freelance writer and publicist and the co-founder of Professionals in Media (PIM) now on LinkedIn. She can be reached at jacqueline@jacquelineherships.com