spinning a holiday web

USHERING IN the holiday season is Halloween. Alongside the shelves of the ever enlarging Halloween merchandise available every October, the Christmas shelves start to fill. There always has to be a trick with a treat to keep good little boys and girls in line. The Christian co-opting of these holidays had a lot to do with this. Several of the oldest European Christmas traditions seem more like Halloween traditions—tricks for bad, treats for good. The old-world traditions were modified to keep the sins of humanity in check in the Christian world. The meaning and symbolism depends on how you look at the magic and mystery of the holiday season that begins with All Hallows Eve. Halloween has its roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain (a celebration of the end of the harvest season) and the Christian All Saints' Day. Although the latter holy day now occurs one day after Halloween, they were both originally celebrated on the same day. But with the blending of holidays one-into-the-other every year, it's hard not to get them all mixed up (like Jack Skellington did—more below).

LEAPING FROM Halloween to Christmas isn't hard web to spin at all. According to German and Ukraine legend, a poor woman was unable to buy decorations for the holiday tree and decorated it with fruits and nuts. Spiders that were displaced in the holiday cleaning of the house spun beautiful webs all over the tree Christmas Eve night. When Father Christmas visited the house, he saw the web-covered tree and changed the webs to silver. Christmas morning, the family awoke to a sparkling tree covered in silver "tinsel." The legend of the Christmas spider is commemorated by placing a silver spider in its web and using tinsel on the tree. The magic of the holiday season is ushered in by the sinister things associated with Halloween (like spiders) every year. The stories have all been modified to fit how one sees best—religious or secular.

IT'S HARD TO to believe the 1993 Tim Burton stop-motion animated movie The Nightmare Before Christmas has already celebrated its 15th anniversary (last year). In the movie, Jack Skellington from Halloween Town opens a portal to Christmas Town and becomes enamored with Christmas, and the fusing of the holidays ensues to great effect. This movie is Tim Burton's best animated film in my opinion. It has a purely magical quality that stands above many of his successive films. It is consistently rated as one of the best Christmas films and  blends the two holidays in an unprecedented way. It's not hard to see how Jack Skellington was inspired by Christmas, even though his attempts are off-kilter because all he has known is Halloween.
 

HALLOWEEN FESTIVE | (Above, right) The large white pumpkin topped by a bewitched bird is from Ross. Green and orange Polish ornaments are reminiscent of a pumpkin and the calyxes of Chinese lanterns. The cat head noisemaker, along with the pumpkin/lantern ornaments are from Cost Plus World Market, and shown nestled with a real miniature white pumpkin and seasonal gourds (from Publix). The cat head noisemaker's (jingle bells attached with a pipe cleaner) original checked bow was replaced with a bow tied from 'Happy Halloween' ribbon from Martha Stewart Crafts at Michael's (2008). The small bumpy ornaments from Martha Stewart Everyday at Kmart round out this fall-colored collection. 

SPIDER SENSE | A Christmas spider in a large white bugle-beaded web ornament (above, left) was bought from a vendor at Scott Antique Market—I believe it is Czech in origin. The reproduction old-fashioned tinsel garland in a coil is from Bayberry Cove by Bethany Lowe Designs, was marketed for Halloween on one side of the sleeve it was packaged in, and for Christmas on the other side. It is attended to by a cardboard spider silhouette from Martha Stewart Holidays at Target (a test market?). The tiny orange and black Halloween baubles are from Border's. 

©2009 DARRYL MOLAND | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

collecting, photography and styling by Darryl Moland

ageless and evergreen

THE GREEN MAN motif in art and mythology has many variations. It is found in many cultures around the world. Often related to deities of nature, it is most often rendered as a face formed by leafy vegetation. As an ancient Pagan icon, the Green Man is interpreted as a symbol of rebirth, representing the cycle of growth each spring—much like the early decorated evergreen trees came to represent. Some speculate that the mythology of the Green Man developed independently in the traditions of separate ancient cultures and evolved into a wide variety of permutations found throughout the world (from Osiris to Peter Pan, and even an ivy-wreathed Father Christmas, for example). He frequently appears, carved in wood or stone, in churches, chapels, abbeys and cathedrals, where examples can be found dating from the 11th century through to the 20th century. Early Christian missionaries would often accomodate local gods such as the Green Man and adapt them into obscure saints. In any case, the Green Man survives as an ultimate symbol of man's connection to nature, as well as a vital symbol of pre-Christian tradition. 

ORNAMENTS that represent a figure are rarely rooted in something deeper than a cartoon character or something meaningless and cute. When a figural ornament catches my eye, there has to be a personification of something in nature involved—something that has a magical and enduring quality to it—much like the Green Man. I have collected several ornaments over the years that personify the evergreen tree and find them to be one of the purest representations of what the custom means to me. The appearance of the first decorated tree dates back to 15th century Germany or earlier, but didn't appear in America until the 1700's. Even so, the decorated tree didn't catch on in the United States until ornaments were brought here by families immigrating from Germany and England in the 1840's after being popularized by the German Prince Albert and his wife Queen Victoria.

THE FRUIT of evergreen trees is the cone or pod, which contains the seeds. Pine cones were the first  glass ornaments made and are a large part of my collection. One of the most memorable Christmas trees of my childhood was a living white pine tree that our family planted in the corner of my parent's yard at the corner of Abel Street and Highway 278 in Hokes Bluff, Alabama. Before my siblings and I sold the property (a couple of years after our parent's death in 2005), I took pictures of the tree, which must have been at least fifty or sixty feet tall at the time. I also collected the large cones that were scattered across the yard with the intent to make a huge wreath out of them.

THIS TREE (left, middle) must have been my first lesson in how meaningful the evergreen would become to me. I fondly remember my father and I laboriously decorating it with those large multi-colored outdoor lights every year until the tree grew too large to manage such an endeavor and too unsafe for the electrical circuits in our home. The annual Christmas trees at the Rockefeller Center in New York City or at the White House in Washington, D.C. had nothing on us in our corner of Alabama. I would stare out the window at that tree every holiday, even after it wasn't lit—imagining it in its first incarnation as a Christmas tree in our living room. It was a beacon in our community for all the light and love my parents gave to our family and will always live in my memory as an ageless and evergreen feat of magic during the holidays.

TREE PERSONIFIED | The face in the tree (top, right) could be interpreted as Santa (or Father Christmas) as well as the Green Man (right) in this unusual figural tree ornament handcrafted in Poland and purchased from Home Goods (2008). A spriteful wood-nymph-as-tree ornament was purchased in 2008 at Papyrus in Lenox Square Mall, Atlanta (where the Macy's Great Tree is lit every holiday).This pine cone ornament's unique coloration is from raku firing (an ancient Japanese technique), hand-casted by J. Davis Studio and was purchased at Maralyn Wilson Gallery in Birmingham, Alabama in 2005. The wooden box made from a hollowed out limb or trunk (shown supporting the figural ornaments) is from Tozai Home. The lid is made flush from a slice of the trunk or limb and rotates on a hidden screw hinge to one side. A similar box could be crafted from your discarded holiday tree trunk.

©2009 DARRYL MOLAND | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

collecting, photography and styling by Darryl Moland; green man art from unknown artist