My family was what you might call ‘culturally Christian.’ When necessary we checked the box Protestant, but my early religious education was from Christmas carols and the narratives I acted out with my small wooden nativity. I sat on the living room floor in front of the family stereo playing a Mitch Miller Christmas Carol album and following along with the words on the insert, verse after verse, getting the words straight, “around yon Virgin” not “a round young Virgin.”
I liked the holiday songs too, especially “The Twelve Days of Christmas” It was fun to sing and tricky to get them in order on the later go rounds. F-i-v-e g-o-l-d r-i-n-g-s was my favorite line, the easiest to remember and it is the break before you sweep the countdown to the partridge and the pear.
It turns out the menagerie of birds--partridge, Colley birds, French hens, geese and swans--I thought were being collected in the barnyard were intended for the twelfth night feast and table. That is probably why dancing ladies, leaping lords, drummers and fifers were also to be gathered up for the final party.1 It was years before I learned the countdown starts on Christmas Day and that Twelfth Night was a holy day.
It was mostly the five gold rings that I remember, it was an extravagant, but relatable image. I now have five golden rings, but most weren’t originally mine and although I know some of the stories, some are mysteries and I have to imagine their stories. Over the years, I have done some genealogy work and have ended up holding what family records there are for many generations. In genealogy there is a desire and need to be precise, but there are gaps. I cannot help it, the storyteller in me begins to imagine connections.
FIRST RING: The smallest is a ring with six tiny diamonds and was passed down without a name. This woman was small, perhaps my great aunt Carrie. She was about five feet tall, but a forceful woman, one of 12 children who put many nephews and nieces through college training programs, moving a generation forward in the world. Or maybe it is a child’s ring, a gift from a doting parent, my grandmother had doting parents. This ring has no clues, it stays a mystery.
SECOND RING: The other small gold ring is engraved inside ‘MATTIE JH’. It is old, likely a wedding ring. In my father’s family tree, there are many men with the initials JH, but only one has a wife whose name Martha might have been known to him as his MATTIE. They were married in 1656.
I can verify that John and Martha were married for 45 years and had seven children, and I am a direct descendent of one of them, Jonathan.2 I can’t verify that John called Martha, his Mattie, or that this was the wedding ring she wore for 45 years but it makes their lives more real to imagine it that way as I hold that gold ring in my hand.
THIRD and FOURTH RINGS: The wide gold ring is my wedding band given to me by my husband Bernie. We came to marriage with grown and almost grown children. The gold ring is etched with flowers and one small heart. The shiny gold wedding band is Bernie’s ring, he wore it faithfully until he passed away in 2016. Older, battle scarred and wiser, we took on the challenge of living together with grace and learned lessons along the way. I know many good stories grounded and bound to these two rings.
FIFTH RING: I heard the story of the last ring from my mother. As a nine year old, she watched it being made by her blacksmith father on his forge. He melted gold he had mined from California mountains and molded it into a ring, roughly polished, with LH etched on the inside. By 1930 his trade as a blacksmith at a local gold mine was long gone and any work as a blacksmith was disappearing. He worked his own gold claims around Mount Shasta.
His oldest daughter was eighteen and heading to Nursing School in San Francisco and he had little to give her for her security. He made her this gold ring so she could raise some money if she was ever in need away from home alone in a big city. Lucile kept the ring until she died, my mother found it in her jewelry box, recognized it and told me the story. I loved the story so much she let me keep the ring and now I hold it in my hand, a treasured gift, a father’s mite.
Memory is so fragile. I don’t know if you have noticed, but it changes as the years go by. Have you had the experience of talking to a sibling about an event when both of you were present? The memories are different and they further modify with age and experience and the fragile minds where they are stored. Imagination is equally unreliable. I can hold these gold rings, tangible metal, but can I know the ‘truth’ of their histories, even those of my own making. So I imagine and tell you a story and it lets us wonder together.
“12 Facts About the classic “12 Days of Christmas”Song, Tentandtable.com, December 16, 2019.
Howard Genealogy : Descendants of John Howard of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, 1643-1903
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I loved your story of the “5 gold rings. 8 made me very teary. Probably because it’s partly my story too. Thank you, Leslie.
Beautiful rings, all of them. How wonderful that Lucile kept hers; I’m sure there would have been times when she needed money.