“If you could reason by pure logic for the occurrence of miracles, they would not be miracles, would they?”
~ Ellis Peters
It isn’t much to look at, a dented fruitcake tin with cutouts from old Christmas cards pasted all around the sides. The contents might not seem very impressive either, but my grandmother’s button box holds the collection of a lifetime.
Collecting buttons wasn’t a hobby for Meemaw, though. It was a practical necessity. She kept her family of six supplied with clothes and linens, and her button box is a homely history told in sewing and mending projects. New buttons still on the card and used buttons saved from clothing outgrown or outworn. Replacement buttons for my grandfather’s work shirts and anchor-embossed buttons from his WWII navy uniform. Pearl buttons left over from a wedding dress. Tiny heart-shapes for baby clothes and big Bakelite flower fasteners from a bygone winter coat.
When I was little and visited my grandmother, sometimes my best friend would come along. On one visit, Meemaw gave us fabric scraps, needle and thread, and the button box to make clothes for our dolls. I don’t think we made many doll clothes, but we were captivated by the buttons, sorting them by colors, sizes, and shapes. We created tiny table settings, imagining the buttons as cups, bowls, and platters, topping them with other buttons for lids, cakes or casseroles. Meemaw put the button box back to work when we left, but on many more visits the buttons became playthings again.
Years later, in her nineties, Meemaw moved from her home into a care facility. Knowing how much I loved her button box, she bequeathed it to me when she no longer needed it. I told Meemaw I would put the box in my carry-on when I flew back home from Oklahoma to South Carolina. It was much too precious to let out of my sight in checked luggage.
Dementia was already stealing away pieces of her memory, but not all of them. Not this one.
“Well, I’ll say,” she exclaimed, using one of her favorite expressions of amazement. “You never know what’s going to turn out to be a treasure, do you?”
It’s always cause for wonder when the ordinary becomes extraordinary.
When all our children lived at home, I bought clementine oranges for our family of five by the four-pound crateful. I packed clementines in the kids’ lunches, and they ate them after school. We all enjoyed them, but our youngest, Wesley, who was nine or ten at the time loved them most of all. So much so that at Christmas, I put a whole crate of oranges under the tree – all for Wesley. I’m pretty sure he polished them off before the holidays were over, and I doubt I gave them another thought when they were gone.
Last year after Christmas dinner with our grownup children, we sat around the table talking about our favorite holiday memories. The first one Wesley mentioned was enjoying that crate of little oranges, the way they smelled and tasted, even how they peeled so easily and came apart in perfect little sections.
When he was telling that story, I thought of Meemaw’s words about the button box.
“You never know what’s going to turn out to be a treasure.”
Every Christmas we spend a lot of time looking for good gifts, but sometimes the best ones catch us unaware. A gift may be ordinary in the moment yet become extraordinary when enjoyed and savored, transformed into an unexpected treasure.
In my childhood, an orange in the bottom of my Christmas stocking was a given – expected if not appreciated. I can’t recall that my sisters and I ever ate them. I figured my mom put an orange in each stocking to fill out the toe and prop up the candy and presents above. Maybe she did it because her mom always put one there. Her mom may have done so because an orange was a special treat for a little girl who grew up with little or nothing, as my grandmother did.
A treat for one generation might seem like stocking filler for the next, but the sweetness of simple gifts has a way of coming back around.
Wesley is a ceramic artist, and the clementine motif appears occasionally in his work, keeping the spirit of a sweet memory. As a gift for the opening of his Bachelor of Fine Arts senior exhibition this month, our family brought him a crate of clementines. His thoughtful classmates included a bowl of clementines with the reception food offerings.
We’ve all heard that the best things in life aren’t things. But sometimes they might be – an old button box, a little crate of clementines. The best things in life just might not be the things we expect.
Terri Barnes is a writer, book editor, and book lover. She is the author of Spouse Calls: Messages from a Military Life.