Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, goes the clock.

            “We gotta’ hurry up and finish decorating the tree.  I have to get supper on the table, it’s almost five o’clock,” said Mom.  She tinsels the Christmas tree, hands over a blue-glass ornament that whirls me around the globe as Mom says this one looks like blue earth.  I hook it to the tree in the midst of tinsel shimmers and Christmastime wishes.

            Mom bought an angel with golden hair, a candle in her hand, and silver stitches around a gown, at Woolworth’s the other day, and, last night, Daddy put the smiling beauty at the top of the tree that’s in a corner of the livingroom.  He set a yellow lightbulb under her wings, her sheer rank hailing her importance, and then placed wooden angel ornaments that trumpet Jesus’s arrival, on the crown moulding above their bedroom door, way up high.

“I don’t want you girls breaking these angels,” said Mom.

I wish that I could put my stuff way up high where my sisters can’t reach.  Last week, after a stay in the hospital, Aunt Matheline gave me a ceramic pink-flowered tea set as a get-well present.  Barb and Maria can’t keep their hands off of it.  Maria already broke a teacup’s handle, and the white bits, like candy cane chips, shimmer-shattered to the floor.  When I complain, Mom tells me to put the tea set away in the bottom drawer of my dresser.  That I do, with dread, knowing all too well it isn’t safe for long from my dumb sisters.  Mom knows that, which pisses me off.  When I complain again, I have to listen to her tell me, for the millionth time, to always be friends with my sisters.

“When you’re old, like me, you’ll want your sisters for friends,” said Mom.

Dear, Sweet, Jesus.

Mom knows decorating is done when the last tinsel ribbon joins a green-needled branch.  She ties the loose strings of her holly-berry patterned apron, smoothes the top at the neck, and takes a red-striped candy cane out of the apron pocket.

“Here, Jeanne, this is for you.  Don’t let your sisters see it,” said Mom.  She hands it over, heads to the kitchen, her sheer rank, the leader of Christmas.