Archaic Glitter

I reached in among the crumbling brown cardboard folds of the box
the unusually shaped bulbous foil reflective ornaments inside were faded
yet were still encrusted with a rough coating of faded glitter...
In my mind, though, the glitter had not faded...

Each one was still brightly colored even in its faded state and the smell
was a combination of old desicated pine needles and old plastic...
The cellophane window on the box of ornaments was yellowed and
peeling and covered with a haze that seemed to consist of a film of
clinging dust that then clung to my fingers when I touched it...

In this musty basement where everything was grey and old and
the smell was that of stones and dust... The old christmas
stockings were still there as well in their felted, compressed and
wrinkled state... They were stiff at first from being left buried in
such a catatonic place...

I wanted to go back furthur but could not see worth a damn
all that illuminated was a swinging lightbulb that cast halos of
marginal light and only made the dust and cobwebs glow all the more...
I knew there was more under the surface boxes and it was even older...

In fact, I wasn't even sure what else was there, but the musty
quilted tree skirt smelled reminiscent of mothballs for some reason
or just old dyed cotton... The rusty legs of the tree stand stuck up from
a cardboard box like a giant red and green dead cartoon insect...

And then I saw it; a nest of old christmas lights that resembled
some rolled up barbed wire waiting to be unraveled and put to
some use... They made a crinkling sound as I picked them up and
the bulbs all clinked together... That sound was a vivid memory somehow...

I suddenly heard my Dads voice laughing and my Moms somber tone...
I was taken back, I don't know how far, but suddenly felt a door open
to a place where my fantasies began; a place where I felt I belonged...
A place where little girls are princesses and they want all they can have...

I realized what an illusion all this Christmas stuff is, and how we need to
decorate everything we can in this ritual that we cling to like spiders
in corners of the dark basement...  Even when these things we keep
begin to crumble and degrade, we keep them for nostalgias sake...

I was tempted to deconstruct this old piled up stack of antiquity that were
merely cardboard boxes full of old junk, but I didn't dare, for they were
older that me, I thought and the dust was too much to fill the air...
So I only looked among the top ones for the important basics of
the Christmas we were preparing for...

I left the rest to continue to collect an even deeper carpet of dust
since it had a certain sacredness; like the tomb of a great king or
something... I wasn't thinking about any afterlife of any of this stuff
I just wanted to get-r-done with all this decorating...
I'd rather be baking cookies and pies, they smell better...
I'll be sneezing for a while and that will become a new memory...

Authors footnote:  This was based on a memory I had of Christmases in the
200 year old house I grew up in...