Author: Marie. P, Word Count: 428
Featured in Midwinter Archaeological Story Moot: Live Stream – Twixtmas 2025
In the end, my grandmother kept a glass jar on her kitchen counter. It was filled with a single string of Christmas lights coiled around itself, with scarcely enough space to distinguish each individual light. Gone were the days of the tree in the den, as she called it. The sparkling angel on top and the glittering āangelsā hairā in the tree gave way to multiple reflections of multi-coloured bulbs against the yellowing backsplash and what is left of the scullery on the counter.
The jar itself may have once housed some beets in vinegar, green tomato ketchup, soup or another sort of summer treat prepared exactly for the dark winter months (and, presumably, the comfort fare that would be served around the darkest week of the year). It is not clear anymore, since these jars had long since lost their previous vocation; in my grandmotherās basement, I have seen the jars of Christmases past used to house nails, bolts, elastic bands and dryer lint.
THE jar, however, lingers all year underneath the sink. It is nudged between the scrubbing pad box and the long-abandoned bin bag box. (It was the time of the sturdy Sobeys bags still, which were re-used for the very little rubbish my grandmother produced). Throughout the year, it saw the languor of January nights, the return of the sun after 6 pm in April, the consuming of Easter chocolate in replacement of the ham, long summer nights spent doing crossword puzzles with the hum and the buzz of the AC machine in the lobby, the fall of the leaves from the pear tree that shielded the house from many sweltering summer suns and, finally, the hand that searched blindly for it sometime in the Advent.
The last year the jar was set, no one knew it would be the last. The greens, blues, reds and yellow would spark as much joy in us as the tree used to; no doubt my grandmother had plucked this string from the last Christmas box before donating the tree to charity to keep the last remnant of our cosy, low-key but still memorable Christmases. In a concert of screeching, we would bring the kitchen chairs as close as we could to the counter, to tell stories and reminisce under this strange new tree. Sure, there were presents involved ā I was still a child, by all accounts ā but this minimalist setting brought light into the darkness in which the northern part of my home province would lay for many months still.
The jar is no more, lights out.
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