A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [119]
Even with one arm in a sling, Cici had no trouble turning fifty tiny terracotta flowerpots into silver candleholders, spraying several hundred pinecones gold, and hot-gluing sheet moss and potpourri onto foam cones to make natural Christmas trees for the mantle collection. She designed topiaries made of chicken wire and sturdy tree limbs to line the front steps, and Lindsay filled them in with evergreen and holly berries, then decorated them with tiny white birds that she had bought at Family Hardware for a dollar a dozen.
The bedlam of the mall at Christmastime was replaced by the chaos of Cici’s workshop, where miles of cedar, spruce, and fir boughs were being painstakingly woven together with baling wire, sprayed with a mixture of wax and water, and hung to dry. An old sled that Bridget found leaning up against a wall in one of the barn stalls was sanded down, painted bright red with silver runners, and hung beside the front door surrounded by evergreen. Cici glued sleigh bells to a cracked leather mule harness and Lindsay used it as the center of a wreath for the front door. An ash bucket with a hole in the bottom was sprayed silver, stenciled in gold, and used to hold a vase of holly in the bathroom. Though they worked from first light in the morning until well into the night, they never ran out of ideas, or of things to do. It was as though the house itself was telling them how it wanted to look for Christmas.
Bridget found a green checked fabric stamped with red ladybugs, scanned the pattern into her computer, and used it to make labels for the jars of jam that were stored in the pantry. She cut squares of the fabric and tied it around the lids of the jars with bright red yarn. Everyone who came to the Christmas party would leave with a jar of gaily decorated Ladybug Farm jam.
Cici spent all day bouncing around in Farley’s pickup truck, surveying the potential Christmas trees on their property. Finally she decided on a cedar for the downstairs and white pine for the landing, both because of their abundance on the property and because of their rapid rate of replenishment . . . and because she knew, without ever having been told, that those were exactly the choices generations of Blackwells had made before her. Farley cut the trees and hauled them inside, huffing and puffing and grunting as they all helped him maneuver the pine up the stairs, and they paid him ten dollars. The huge cedar spread its boughs across the corner of the main parlor and the giant pine looked down upon them from the front landing, and suddenly the rooms did not seem so sparsely furnished anymore. The house was starting to look like a home.
Day by day the rooms, once cold and filled with nothing but potential, began to transform themselves into a Victorian Christmas card. Mantles were draped with velvet and lined with evergreen and stacked with displays of gold Christmas ornaments in crystal vases or sugared fruit in wooden bowls or small topiaries covered with dried rose-buds and decorated with cinnamon sticks and lace. Living wreaths, suspended by velvet ribbon, hung from every window. Evergreen garland wound up the long bannister, tied with fluffy burgandy velvet bows that were centered with clusters of silver and gold ornaments. Living garlands draped every doorway and sprays of evergreen adorned every surface. The Christmas trees came to life with hundreds of tiny white lights, bouquets of pale pink and blue dried hydrangea that Lindsay had preserved from their own garden, and angel shapes cut from lace and stiffened with starch.
Ida Mae delivered her fruitcakes. Bridget kept the ovens going day and night, baking meringue cups, cheese straws, cranberry bread, and layer cakes. Ida Mae made the sausage stuffing