To the editor:
The March 23 “Cup O’ Joe: It is time to move on” was a saver, for the humor in a writer’s plight as he tried to fathom the folly of the past-prime Christmas wreaths persisting into Spring.
Wreaths have seldom found favor with me, as they remind me of gravestones. I did make one for Christmas once to prove I could, but it seemed foreign on my door. Sprays are simpler.
A Maine balsam fir wreath I ordered one year for the backyard came decorated with a wide blue velvet bow and artificial blueberries. You can figure it came from Down East. How about a burlap bow with red trim and tiny potatoes instead?
A very crafts-y friend once ignored my protests, insisting I accept a large grapevine wreath, decorated with dried material and scented with cinnamon oil. A cinnamon-scented powder room was pleasant, but how to dust it without loosening the dried material? Then it came loose by itself, a bit hanging here, a bit there. Fixing it would require a glue gun. Finally, one day the wreath went into my car to be let out by my friend’s side door. Maybe she would renovate it. Then again … she has never mentioned it. Nor have I.
Joe Cyr’s column reminded me of a wreath story, which may provide the answer to his Why? A Rochester woman told this one: When I was a college student I spent a summer in New Hampshire. Every day going to work I passed a house with a Christmas wreath still on the door. There was a rocking chair on the porch, but no one around. Then, the day before I was to leave town, a man sat rocking. I stopped, said, “Hello, I’ve been wondering about your wreath. That is, well, why don’t you take it down?” He looked up at the wreath, then back at me, and said, “T’aint dead yit.”
Byrna Porter Weir
Rochester, N.Y.
