Taking apart Christmas – the tree, the mantle, the boughs, the crèche – is even more fraught with memory and emotion, smiles and tears as setting it up in the first place was.

Even the boxes I store the stuff in are meaningful.

One well-worn cardboard box with a lid originally held my mother’s fur coat. Our next-door neighbor when I was young was a furrier (imagine!), and every year he’d take that coat downtown to his shop and store it for my mother, bringing it back to her in the fall. It hasn’t held a fur coat in half a century, but every year since then that box brings back my mother and Eddie Edwards the furrier, a tiny piece of my childhood.

A stack of those nice, sturdy Harry and David fruit boxes come out next. Harry and David pears arrived every Christmas from my brother; I can still taste them. Though there are many, many reminders in this house of the brother I lost just a couple of years before Wally, my two best friends through life, these tattered boxes bring him back viscerally, his care for me all through his life.

A husband is one thing, a sibling quite another. Unless you married the kid next door, only a sibling has known you all your life; only he/she knows about the intricacies and intimacies of your family life. When your last, or only, sibling is gone, a whole lot of the history that made you goes too.

So brother Bill comes out now each Christmas with those H. and D. boxes, each one holding certain ornaments: the flat wooden ones I painted in the hospital, the year my first was born (they kept you in five days!); another holds the dolls – angels, a clown, an African angel made out of bark, some clothespin dolls I made; the “Number One Teacher” apple ornaments, which Wally brought home every year on the last day of school, along with the gifts and plates of cookies and fudge and candy canes. Only another teacher’s spouse can relate; the kids (and me too) would wait at the door as he unloaded the car with the day’s loot.

And of course, there’s the collection of kid-made ornaments I can’t bear to part with. They fill almost a whole box. Many of them are dated – “Andy 1985” – but the origin of most are a puzzle. The very wonky God’s eye one boy made for me (see photo), a moldy bread dough Christmas tree that’s been retired from duty, but still has a place in the box. Assorted unrecognizable efforts, the hook they hang from the only indication that this was meant to be a Christmas tree ornament.

A large, gold-foil covered box came into the family one Christmas when I was probably 9 or 10. My dad brought it home from “the office”, that mysterious place he went every day. It was a gift from his boss, and my mother put it under the tree. Bill and I went crazy all the days until Christmas, surreptitiously picking it up – it was really heavy –shaking it, trying to guess what was inside. It turned out to be pretty boring; a desk set thing with pen holder, cigarette box, picture frame, etc.; all but the box are long gone. Now it holds the dwindling collection of old glass ornaments. Seems like every year another one breaks.

As I take each off the tree and decide which box it goes in, I’m reminded of faces, of voices from long ago:

The 1978 Hallmark ball for Andy’s first Christmas from Hoppi Graham, one of our first friends in Lincolnville.

Two hand-painted plaster figures, Mary and Joseph I think, from Cathy, friend of a friend visiting from England, “For Bill” and “For Eddie” written in pencil on the back. Must have been pre-Andy, so the early 70’s.

Some handmade ornaments – a little quilted stocking, a stuffed angel – from Linda, my childhood friend, and a wooden “Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe” from Rosemary, her mother.

The sequined and beaded balls my mother made; they’re a bit awkward, a sign that her faculties were starting to fail. I remember that my mother, whose exquisite beading and knitting was her pride, wasn’t happy with those balls. She couldn’t figure out how to make hangers for them, so they usually stay in the box, the last examples I have of her handiwork.

The handful of ornaments from my Dad’s childhood trees, c. 1910: a tiny double-sided mirror, painted with Santa and reindeer, a couple of clusters of glass balls hanging on beaded strings, a yarn angel with cardboard foil wings.

The flocked-paper angel band – a six piece band – that Wally brought to our marriage. I have no idea where he got them, and I don’t think he did either.

A couple of elaborately-sequined ornaments – an angel and a stocking – that accompanied my Uncle Bill and Aunt Mary’s annual Christmas gift of a subscription to Reader’s Digest. That couple is hazy in my memory as they lived in the East when we lived in the Midwest.

Two of my dad’s three brothers inexplicably moved to Connecticut and New York; their children, my cousins, scattered to the four winds (as did I). I see occasional Facebook posts with my maiden name – Roesing – and know these are somehow kin, and get a card every year from one, but basically have no contact.

Christmas Day I found myself one of 20 people in a text chain of Merry Christmases back and forth, but no one was identified except by phone number. I finally figured out this was my birth family, these people by blood, but every bit as scattered as my adoptive family.

Packing away the Christmas decorations I wonder, as I do every year, what the next will bring – in my family, in yours, in our world. Among its many layers of meaning is this treasure of memory that makes us remember, relive, and hopefully rejoice in the people who shaped us, who’ve been meaningful in our lives. The boxes have been carefully replaced in the corner of the loft, waiting for another year.