The Ornamental Star, a Christmas Story

Here's a charming Christmas Story by "cousin" Tom Williams. He's a Marco Island charter captain and scuba diver and the author of Lost and Found, a fine thriller which I thoroughly enjoyed. 

The Ornamental Star

By Tom Williams

            All of the ornaments knew that Christmas was coming. Most of the decorations tried to remain calm, but as autumn turned to winter, the tension in the storage boxes became unbearable. Almost every ornament could remember the housemother’s sigh when she opened the box and at least one globe had shattered with worry. It happened every year. All the decorations were packed away into the New Year whole, but as the holidays approached, someone always fractured with upcoming tension.

As every ornament knew, each year was different and full of possibilities. On some years, the elderly globes were chosen right away. They were selected first and set atop the highest branches. On other years, the housemother would be younger and the elders would not even be allowed out of the box. On some unfortunate holiday seasons, Christmas trees would end up with day-glow tinsel, or even the humiliation of fake snow flocking.

Everyone, new or old-fashioned, gilded or plain, wanted a good placement on the tree. Higher was always better, but on some years, a lower branch could be your destiny and a dreadful perch within easy reach of a toddler or the house cat on patrol. Every ornament could recall at least one acquaintance, pulled from the tree and shattered on the floor.

Of course, no one wanted to think about the end, the broom, and the dustbin, and most understood that contemplating destruction was not the right attitude when emerging from the box. Every decoration had heard the old stories about the ornaments with optimism; the more the inner glow, the easier it was to shine and capture the housemother’s eye.

This year when the boxes came down, all the decorations were optimistic for higher branches and higher status, but most of all, every ornament and every light, wanted to be near the shining star. Even the less ambitious globes wanted a good place on the tree; but every globe, no matter how large or small, wanted to be away from the lower branches, the little pulling fingers, and the easy reach of the climbing cat and the deadly paws of destruction.

From the moment the housemother opened the box, Bobsled Jangles knew he had a good chance. After all, this was the same housemother as the year before. The very same who carefully considered Bobsled and placed him well above the others.

He had clearly been a favorite, and was able to watch the shining star as she rose from her private package. He had even witnessed the coupling with the electric lights, as she gained her shining radiance.

Everyone knew that the lights thought they were special, but to Bobsled Jangles the artificial glow was no match for a good globes’ inner enthusiasm.

Suddenly, Bobsled shuddered. In the next section, an elderly globe with a blue body and a snowflake pattern was lifted out in pieces, his hanger broken, and his sparkling remains useless.

The housemother reacted in her usual way: a head tilt of regret, a sigh of disappointment, and then a move toward the inevitable dustbin.

Enthusiasm, Bobsled Jangles reminded himself, the inner glow, and the living spirit of Christmas was the true secret and strength of the holidays.

Even as he focused and tried to shine, someone from the corner of the box was lifted: an elongated shiny teardrop, golden with a new hanger. The housemother went to her tiptoes and suddenly the golden teardrop was well above Bobsled’s last position, and hanging on a branch almost at the top.

This housemother was fast, and before Bobsled could focus, another globe was chosen but to everyone’s horror, the new age silver ball was destined for the lowest branch, and a sacrificial position perfect for toddlers and cat’s paws.

Bobsled could see the broom and dustbin, and he shuddered with a little rattle. The unexpected action must have attracted the housemother’s attention, because before he could even concentrate on shining, Bobsled Jangles was out of the box and flying. His hanger held precariously, as one of the dreaded toddlers came running into the room. A hideous cry escaped from the child’s lips and destructive hands reached upward to claw at Bobsled’s bottom.

All thoughts of shining were tossed to the wayside as Bobsled and his gilded snowy path and horse-drawn sleigh dangled in the uncertain future. With an almost shattering whoosh, the housemother bent at the knees and Bobsled plunged downward. Before he could do anything but dangle near the grasping toddler’s fingers, he was up and away and pulled to safety. But not really safe, and still in turmoil, as the housemother appeared to be undecided. Then as the toddler quickly turned to approach her private package, the housemother lifted Bobsled Jangles to the tree’s very center and much higher than ever before.

For the moment, Bobsled was overwhelmed, he had never been so well placed and never so high. He was even safe from the bigger children’s clutches and he was very near the top. When he looked aloft, he could even see the highest branch, the end of the lights, and the very pinnacle where she would ultimately rest.

With typical ornamental nature, the quickened thoughts of believing his placement might be a dream, or that he was precariously hung or destined to fall, quickly evaporated. His place was here, near the top, and he was safely anchored. Only two other globes were higher than Bobsled, but none as large and easy to notice.

When all the others had found their destinies, and when the lights were on and everyone was shining, the housemother opened the package.

“It’s time again Miss Highpoint,” the protective garments rustled.

“Forget it!” the reclining star responded. “They never give me enough time, I’m not finished resting. My prongs are still sore from last year’s tree and I want nothing to do with those sleazy electric lights. Just tell me why I have to go on?”

The protective garments sighed. “Miss Highpoint, you know that Christmas isn’t the same without you. You are the most important, and the pinnacle of the holidays. All the others look up to you!”

“But I don’t want to go! I want to stay in the box. I want nothing to do with this year’s tree!”

“Miss Highpoint, you know that’s not an option.”

“Yes it is! Close this box! I’m not leaving this chamber! Besides, all those other ornaments are so common and boring. I simply can’t be bothered!

“Miss Highpoint, the housemother is coming.” The protective garments settled deeper.

“I can’t go again—not to the top. I’ve developed a fear of heights. That’s it! A fear of heights! Seal this box, I’m not going!”

Then she was out of the package and into the light. This year’s tree looked even pricklier and the odor from the pine boughs stronger than ever; enough to cause a headache even in the most senior of stars.

Again, she was rising, higher and higher, her destination assured. She passed the old, the young, the round and the engraved, the stupid lights that blinked and the ones that heaven forbid: bubbled. Past the middle, where at least, some social order existed, but the higher she rose, it was easier to look down upon the others. Everything was so boring, but just near the top when she was forced to stop and endure the dreadful “plugging in,” Her Celestial Majesty; the First Lady of Highpoint was slightly amused.

Looking at her almost eye to eye was a silly, old blue ornament with a horse-drawn sleigh. As she was being arranged, the blue globe was staring. He was staring as the sleazy electric lights were being coupled, and as the pinnacle of the tree was being prepared to accept her prongs.

“What are you looking at?” the shining star hissed.

“Pardon me Miss Highpoint,” Bobsled jangles stuttered. “But I never even hoped we would meet. I never even dreamed meeting you was possible!”

“You idiot! We haven’t been introduced! Don’t you realize that you and all the commoners are just something beneath me? I’m the true star, and the only real ornament, and—

“Oh my God,” a neighboring ornament gasped when the star was suddenly taken to the top and secured on her perch. “What did she say?” the smaller ornament whispered, “She was too far away, and when she was plugged in and her radiance came, I was star struck! Tell me older brother, what did she say?”

Bobsled Jangles looked first to the little ornament who was questioning, then across to the others who were watching, and finally down to all the less fortunate globes, lights, and lesser ornaments. He then thought about the years of tradition, of high hopes and disappointment, and then the true spirit of the holidays. After a moment, he cautiously whispered.

“She said to be careful what you wish for . . . and to be happy where you are.”

  

            Happy Holidays!

   

Be sure to check out Tom Williams' Website

 

 

 

The Ghost Wore a Kimono

She stood at the foot of the bed. I could make out her shoulder, the way her elbow was bent, her regal posture. Her face was indistinct but even so, a swirl of hair moved about her head. She was a ghost, dressed in a kimono, and I was fascinated and also thrilled to have awakened from a dream and to find her standing in my bedroom on a warm and sultry night in Florida, of all places.


 It is difficult enough for an insomniac such as I am to achieve so much as a dream state, definitely not a good thing for a writer of fiction, and here I was, blessed to be seeing a ghost, a creature straight out of story and legend.

There was nothing threatening about her at all and minutes passed and though she was perfectly still, I could see various aspects of her shape shimmering in the moonlight, but I wanted more from this vision, greedy person that I am, and so I hopped out of bed the better to see her features, at which point her body faded into a lampshade.

Gruntled: Are you there yet?

“Be gruntled. Start building,” screams the full-page newspaper ad by Careerbuilder.com. I’m hooked. Gruntled? What kind of word is that?

Disgruntled is a word we all know, especially in the context of the disgruntled employee who pulls a pistol at the office. Come to think of it, disgruntled doesn’t seem to be widely used in any other context. Had some copywriter coined gruntled, to mean “be satisfied,” or “be happy with your work?”

Gruntled is a word in its own right, or so I found out from my on-line dictionary. However, the closer of the two definitions given says that gruntled means “to calm,” or “still,” which doesn’t quite fit. More apt is probably the WordWeb online definition “to cause to be more favorably inclined.”

There’s also a webside, gruntle.com advertising “what you want when you need it.” Quite possibly what I really need is a softwear product called Gruntle for Windows, where the softwear reads what’s on my screen and interprets my problem, as opposed to the Windows version, where they show what some engineer thinks I should be seeing. Install this device and I would probably have fewer disgruntled moments where I want to throw my laptop through one of my windows.

Another site, gruntle.org, promotes several enticing products written in a quite possibly put-on computer language called python: Check out Madcow;IRC Bot; PyFiglet and Insub.

Gruntle is a very old word, says fantasy writer Anne Ewan, who has a degree in linguistics (http://www.esmerel.com/circle/wordlore/). Gruntle once meant “grumble.” The dis in front of it meant completely. So in a sense our disgruntled employee comes straight out of Dickens. I can see him walking around grumbling rather loudly about his or her situation. Gruntled, Ewan says, came about as a “back formation” where people created gruntled, meaning the opposite of disgruntled, but that’s okay, Ewan says, people do that all the time, so welcome to a gruntled world.

Gruntled might fit into a piece of writing suggesting ancient history or maybe some science fiction setting as in “Merlin gruntled his winged steed,” for instance, where today we would say, “The jockey gentled his mount at the starting gate.”

Who could get away using gruntle? E.L. Doctorow,maybe? Cormac McCarthy, writing about the modern wild west? Dean Koontz writing one of his misfit characters? I become disgruntled simply thinking about how to use gruntled, and so then I told myself to get a grip, as in “Gruntle yourself girl.”

However, if I were looking for a job, I can’t believe I’d sit across from a prospective employer and say that I used to be a disgruntled employee and that my aim in a new job is to gruntle myself. Not unless I was seeking a job as the sorcerer’s apprentice that is. And then I decided to the obvious. I went to Careerbuilder.com and typed “gruntle” into the job search. Nothing came up. Maybe I should try sorcerer’s apprentice?

Wordwise, '07 Was a Subprime Year

“How was I?”

“Subprime.”

How was your golf game, dear?

“Subprime.”

“And what do you think of the word of the year?”

“I’d say it was a subprime pick.”

“Subprime sucks?”

“Subzero is okay. Subzero is useful. Subprime’s a fad. It’s a flaky word”

“Why do you say that?”

“Subprime’s marginal.”

“Isn’t that the meaning of the word?”

“Subprime is borderline.”

“Yes, but you can’t just go in and ask for a borderline loan.”

“In that case you would ask to see a loan shark.”

“No banker wants to be called a loan shark.”

“That’s the problem with a word like subprime. Suprime lending is a national

disgrace. It’s loansharking by another name, predatory lending at the least.”

“So how was I?”

“You were a shark, hon.”

“You were positively predatory.”
“And not subprime? I feel better already?”

“So how was the golf game.”

“I was a shark out there.”

Writers are Readers? Oh yes!

Writers are readers? Yes, of course we are. That’s why I immediately answered novelist Katherine Stone’s e-mailed invitation to check out her web site, Writers are readers.com. (www.writersarereaders.com). I’m only too glad I did.

Katherine said that she and her husband, author Jack Chase, who created the site, noticed something odd about the book review process. Authors of commercial fiction were rarely involved in reviewing books, when one would think such authors would know a thing or two about the craft of writing. Stone and Chase are also aware of the decline in book reviewers in the print world as print itself shrinks while the internet expands exponentially.

As a result, these two creative types have produced what I find to be a fascinating website: authors reviewing books by other authors. The game is, the authors can handle the review any way they choose. Yes the famous names are there, and as I scanned down the list I found several whose works I know and respect: there’s Linda Fairstein whom I met at last year’s Sleuthfest and whose mystery, Entombed, is filled with little known lore about Edgar Allen Poe. John Saul whom I met at the Maui Writer’s Conference a few years ago, fulminates about his training as a playwright, before he gets down to writing a perceptive review of The Diana Chronicles, and I thought everything had already been said about Tina Brown’s book. Heather Graham has posted a review as well. I met and interviewed Heather years ago as a reporter. Why am I not surprised that this actress-turned-novelist hit the big time?

Those of us who are newbie authors are also offered the opportunity to submit reviews, after our peers vouch for us, that is. As it happened I was reading A Grave Injustice, a paranormal mystery by author Prudy Taylor Board at the time and was pleased to do a review of this exciting read. In the process, I found myself using some examples from Prudy’s book to talk about how very specific imagery is what a seasoned author uses to put real flesh on the bones of her characters, as Prudy does so aptly.

Katherine Stone loved the review and asked me to submit more of them, which I intend to do as time permits. For quality book reviews, by authors themselves, the people who know a thing or two about writing, browse through Writer’s are Readers.com. I do hope you readers who love a good mystery will check out my review of Prudy Board’s book. Author Board uses the paranormal genre as a springboard to some fascinating World War II history. My feeling is, you’ll do yourselves A Grave Injustice if you miss out on this gem of a mystery.

Boxing Day

Negril, Jamaica:

Boxing Day, Dec 26

The morning sun polishes a smooth sea to a metallic sheen, a gorgeous but blinding sight, which is why the early diners take shelter under the thatched roof of the LTU Pub, the runway between the kitchen and the bar. The family straggles in.

Jamaica Bill, who does his best to keep the rest of us from running amok, arrives with a brick of the smoked marlin left from last night’s Christmas dinner and we polish this off with bagels, cream cheese and a fruit plate of pineapple, papaya, and, wonder of wonder, bananas. A hand of bananas arrived this morning by bearer, and so young Luke promptly orders LTU’s famous banana pancakes. We’ve been here a week now, and it has been Yes We Have No Bananas until this morning. Hurricane Dean earlier in the fall has been hard on the crop.

The smoked marlin has a delicate flavor all its own, by the way, and is as good an excuse as any to sojourn in Negril. Another excuse is coconut water, sucked right out of a green cocoanut via means of a straw. Coconut water is the only juice that goes straight to the heart. As any Jamaican will tell you, a glass—or a nut-full of coconut water, mon, it’s good for the blood pressure and the heart.

The Williams clan is in a triumphant mood. Yes we managed to pull off a tropical Christmas dinner at Jamaica Bill’s place, despite the fact that his beach house perched on the sea cliffs took a few hits from Dean. At least the roof stayed on the place this time, and most of the crockery remained intact. The light fixtures in the kitchen, however, were defunct, due to salt water intrusion, leaving us to cook by lamp and candle light.

There’s a tense moment early in the afternoon when the gas stove that was supposed to be roasting the oven coughed and quit. Jamaica Bill ordered everything off, all top burners. A sniff test ensued, some dials were twiddled and yes the chicken was roasted to a perfect skin crunching crisp.

Louisiana gumbo was supposed to be the main course, but had to be scratched due to the absence of a viable quantity of okra. We found a bud or two along the fence on the property at LTU Villas, but that wouldn’t do for twenty guests. Mama Nanin stepped in with a new plan. Shrimp in marinara sauce, so we chopped onion, garlic, and green pepper, but not the celery, a delicacy which Jamaica Bill had ordered for the now-defunct gumbo project, but Mama Nanin sniffed and informed us that in the wider culinary world—beyond the States—celery is a nonentity. The Parisians wouldn’t touch the stuff.

Mama Nanin brought all the makings for her famous champagne punch and then some, which is how she managed to pour a bottle of vodka into the mix, rather than triple sec, intended to substitute for peach schnapps. Oh well, the brew proved to be as powerful as it was popular.

Jamaica Bill made his famous pesto pasta, the one with the artichoke hearts. Jamaica Bill’s pesto is fresh made and he supplies it in bulk to the rest of the West End, at least the tonier establishments.

At one point a strange round object lined with what appeared to be lightening bolts appeared on the TV screen. This proved to be the interior of young Luke’s eyeball. He was trying out one of his Christmas presents, an electronic microscope, an Eyeclops, which you hook into the TV screen. The inside of an eyeball is an eerie sight indeed, especially if you’d had more than a few sips of the champagne and vodka punch.

A day which began with snorkeling, the exploration of sea caves, the sighting of jelly fish, dolphins, a thing that was probably a sea snake, and the discovery of baby coral growing in a tide pool meant an early end to the festivities.

The party ended when young Luke asked Jamaica Bill to produce the bottle containing a famous relic, the two-foot centipede. After fifteen years in a jar, the centipede has shrunk to a shadow of its vicious self. Jamaica Bill, who is six feet four inches tall, told how he managed to battle to the death this aggressive creature by standing on a kitchen stool and spraying it with an entire can of bug spray, the fumes of which nearly poisoned Jamaica Bill himself before the centipede expired.

At that point, those of us who were about to expire from the ravages of the champagne punch were driven back to our rooms at The LTU Villas, while the heartier souls retired to the pub bar to toast in Christmas.

The Twenty Somethings arrived late, wolfed their breakfast, and sped off. It’s going to be a tough day for them, what with a catamaran cruise on the Wild Thing in the morning followed by a reggae party tonight on Seven Miles beach and so they left their back-to-the States gift shopping to be done by cooler heads. Three bags of Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee and two rum creams ought to do it, Mom. Or is it two bags of the coffee and three of the rum cream? Oh dear, leave it to Mom to get it wrong.

Young Luke is off to scuba class followed by a trip to the beach, leaving his grandparents Bill Senior and Mama Nanin free to reminisce about the good old days in Havana, New Orleans, Houston, Paris, Vermont, Bloomington, and places like that.

Our friend Janice from Boston has arrived with a late bulletin: the water system has been switched over to backup so don’t drink the tap stuff, but I’m already tapped out and so far am feeling very fine, except my left leg is a bit stiff from yesterdays climb up and down the steep steps cut into the side of the West End cliffs. The stairs wind through a lava tube and end at a shelf carved into the cliffs, where we dive into the sea for a cool down before slathering on the sun oil and settle into some serious sunbathing. Nevertheless, when Janice proposes a trip to Mayfield Falls where we’ll explore a mountain spring, I’m all for it.

The Winter of the Wood Stork

Fort Myers, Florida

As usual I was running late for a mundane appointment, when I glanced out on the lake. There on the point just around the bend, a vision appeared, the likes of which I never expected to see: wood storks. A pair of them had just touched down in our sedate suburban neighborhood, a cluster of low-rise villas with Hawaiian-style notched roofs the better to repel high winds, since we happen to inhabit a flood plain embarrassingly close to the Caloosahatchee River.
Yes, we’re squeezed between a mini-lake and a river, and yes, we are a small scale bird sanctuary, what with the cattle egrets cackling like a flock of exotic chickens as they march around the lake, grubbing for goodies out of the lawn. Anhingas arrive and depart daily from designated pine tree limbs with the regularity of an airport shuttle; coots, mallards and moorhens glide past the door, and red-headed woodpeckers drum on the tree trunks. Our back yard is occasionally patrolled by a very patrician great blue heron, but wood storks? An endangered species? What were they doing here?

I grabbed for one of the several pairs of binoculars we keep out for just such chance occasions as this, and consulted the Birds of Florida Field Guide. Through field glasses I watched these birds fluff their white plumage like a pair of tall feather dusters. When flashes of black appeared on their under carriage I knew they were wood storks.

About forty inches tall with the long, curved bill of a wading species, and the bald, leathery black head of a turkey, the wood storks teetering along on stilt-like legs were an ungainly pair, a comedy in feathers, so to speak.

Appointment forgotten, I crept toward the birds, hoping the sun might disappear behind a cloud. The bigger stork stretched out one enormous wing, revealing a wide black racing stripe along the trailing edge. I was enthralled. This was a gull-wing sort of move, if you’ve ever seen one of those fancy cars where the doors open from the top—only now, thanks to this sighting, I’ll think of such a movement as stork-winged.

At any rate, the demonstration of wing-power that I witnessed made me acutely aware that these storks’ wingspread seemed twice as wide as the birds were tall. This no doubt accounts for the fact that these frequent fliers don’t bother with baggage checks and airport security.
Lax photographer that I am, I had no camera in the house, so I tried for a shot off my cell phone, but I was facing into the sun and the cell phone informed me in a curt message beamed from some satellite that it could see nothing to photograph. If I managed to creep through the neighborhood and photograph the wood storks from the other side, I’d miss the action completely. Instead, I sought a witness, our friend Domingo, who had just arrived to clean out the gutters, so that he could enjoy such a rare sighting.

I also called Flora, who lives across the street in a sprawling garden compound full of native and exotic species. I asked Flora if she had ever seen a wood stork in the neighborhood. Never, she said. Not once in the twenty-five years she’d been on her beloved property. Flora couldn’t come over; she was headed out on some appointment of her own.

“They’ll be back,” she assured me, but I haven’t seen the wood storks again, and this sighting happened a week ago.

Meanwhile, I began to fear that if wood storks were showing up in my neighborhood, this was probably an ominous sign. It meant that the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary where the storks nest must not be in good shape, and in checking up on the internet, I found my fears confirmed. The nesting season in ’07 was a disaster due to a hundred-year drought here in Florida.
During the `80s, birders and government officials discovered that the U.S. wood stork population had dwindled to some five thousand pairs. The main haven for wood storks and other species is the Corkscrew Sanctuary, the nation’s last remaining stand of native bald cypress trees, a fifty by seventy-five mile swath of old timber purchased from lumber companies by the National Audubon Society in 1954. The Corkscrew Sanctuary is open to the public, located just north of Immokalee Road in the rugged and beautiful Central Florida interior. This is primeval country, a world of flatlands, prairie marshes, and bald cypress forest about fifteen miles west of I-75 at Immokalee Road between Fort Myers and Naples (http://www.corkscrew.audubon.org).

Wood storks wade in swampy areas catching prey by feel. Since the ‘60s their habitat has been shrinking due to pressure from farming and urban development, and well before that, of course various bird species were hunted to extinction in the late eighteen hundreds.

As for the wood stork, efforts to preserve habitat and monitor the birds has paid off. The wood stork population has doubled, according to a five-year assessment recently concluded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency has recommended that the status of the species be upgraded from endangered to threatened.

Snowbirds such as us have nothing on wood storks, which may range from the Carolinas to Latin America. Troll around on the internet, and you’ll find studies of individual wood storks that were banded and tracked via global positioning devices. These fascinating accounts show that in a group of ten or so wood storks, one individual might have started out from a home base in South Carolina and hardly moved from its home county; another might have trekked from the Carolinas down to Key West, maybe headed down in time for the Fantasy Fest, while an even hardier or adventurous bird headed for the Yucatan peninsula and was perhaps learning to tango in Cancun.

Due to rapid development, the Florida habitat is the wood stork’s least stable nesting ground. In January, thanks to a $200,000 grant from the National Park Service, the resource manager from the Corkscrew Sanctuary is monitoring the wood stork in five southern Florida counties, looking for more places where the birds might have secured nesting grounds. Meanwhile the biologists tracking the wood storks have learned that these resourceful birds have helped themselves. Colonies of them have moved on to Mississippi and North Carolina in search of better nesting.

Meanwhile, I do hope our own neighborhood passed muster with the wood stork pair. If only they would build one of their platform nests hereabouts, wouldn’t that be a thrill? After all, a wood stork wouldn’t have to pass muster with some condo board. But I wonder? If a pair of wood storks move in, would they have to be approved by the anhinga brood? And what about the snooty great heron? Would he let them in?