The work of their hands

by June
Elves are busy here. Our daughters enter into the merrymaking with verve, and that's a very good thing. They have taken over most of the cookie baking (and the washing up). They untangle the lights and feed them up to me as I circle the tree on the stepladder. They wrap packages, pack them into boxes, and weigh the boxes for shipping. They sew gifts for one another.

I cherish watching them work. Their hands are beautiful in this mother's eyes. Their fingers are graceful and careful. I remember when those fingers first gripped a fat crayon; now they can maneuver through delicate stitches. It is this season that provides important markers of their passage through childhood. Each year they manage more on their own.

Homeschooling is especially dear to me in these crazy-busy weeks, not just because it gives us the flexibility to stop the crazy-busy and go sing-along with "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" at Longfellow's home church. The tree is twinkling as we do math, and I get to hear their first impressions of Truman Capote's exquisite prose as each of them wraps up her first read of A Christmas Memory.

Fern's gift for mama last year

Blossom's gift for mama last year

 This is the season when I feel how far they've come in the last year. We take the official, state-required measure of their progress each spring, but it's when the girls are planning and executing their Christmas surprises that the progress makes itself felt.

Fern's surprise from Blossom, Christmas 2009: Doozie the Hen

They are growing up, our Blossom and Fern. But on Christmas morning they still have the giddy delight of the littlest children. It is delight not only in receiving but especially in giving what they have made with their own hands. I love to watch their hands do the work, but, on Christmas morning, it's their faces I watch. Oh, the joy.

Blossom loves Pickles the Polar Bear, made by Fern
Christmas 2009; hat also by Fern