By holding our big family gathering the weekend before Christmas, most of the pressure is off around here—except for doing the Man Overboard galleys—which have just now shown up in an e-mail message.

A centerpiece of our annual celebration is the fact that the house is pretty much gift-wrapped from top to bottom.  There’s a story behind this process.  As Bill will tell you, with me there are no short stories, so here goes:

By 1984, I had been divorced for four years. My kids and I were living with my sister in a condo in Seattle’s downtown Denny Regrade neighborhood.  My first spouse had died at the end of 1982. In early 1983, I went searching through the strong box for the official documents I needed to send to Social Security and insurance companies.  Tucked in among all the paperwork, I discovered bits and pieces of poetry I’d been writing in secret for the better part of twenty years.  

As soon as I read through the poetry, I could see that what I had originally thought of as “art” really wasn’t.  Instead, it was a poetic retelling of very sad story—the realities of losing a spouse to the ravages of alcoholism.  When I showed the poems to others they said, “This needs to be a book.”  And that’s what happened. After the Fire became my first published work. I’m proud to say that it’s still in print today—in both paper-and-ink and e-book editions.

Initially, however, it was a very humble, self-published effort. In order to sell copies, we went to see a guy named Jim Hunt who ran a flower shop in the office lobby area of our building.  He took a few on consignment and sold one to a woman named Diane Bingham, a Vietnam War-era widow, who was one of the movers and shakers behind the establishment of WICS—Widowed Information Consultation Services of King County.  She took her copy of After the Fire to the grief support group she was facilitating. Later she contacted me and asked if I’d do a poetry reading at a Widowed Retreat in June of the following year.

I agreed to do so, but with a good deal of misgiving.  I had been divorced for a year and a half when my first husband died. Although the presence of that decree of dissolution did nothing to lessen the grief I felt when my former husband died, it did make me question the suitability of my showing up at a “widowed” retreat.  After all, those other people were still married to their spouses when they died.  I was divorced.

Since I had said I would go, however, go I did.  While there, I met Bill.  He was a member of Diane Bingham’s grief support group. He showed up at the retreat because he had offered to drive some of the much older widows in his group to the retreat site which was out in the wilds of Hood Canal.  We both went to the retreat not so much because we wanted to be there, but because we had promised someone else that we would.  It turns out it was a good thing we’re both people who keep our word.

We met briefly at lunch on that Saturday and again during an after-dinner grief workshop. (Bill did NOT attend the afternoon poetry reading.) In the workshop, we discovered that our first spouses had died on the same day of the year, two years apart—a few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve.  Based on that coincidence, we struck up a conversation on the evening of June 21,1985 and married six months later to the day on December 21,1985.  That means that today is our thirty-first wedding anniversary.

In the process of our whirlwind courtship and my moving from Seattle to Bellevue, we lost track of Jim Hunt.  Then, about fifteen years ago, while doing a remodel on a house in Bellevue, we ran into him and a neighbor of ours at a plumbing supply store in Seattle.  Jim is a very talented interior designer, and that chance encounter put us back in the same orbit.

When we bought a new house in Bellevue in 2005, Jim came and sat in the house for hours on end, studying it while it was still completely empty and entirely Ralph Lauren Brown—unmitigated Ralph Lauren Brown!  He helped us remodel the place to suit us, a process which included ditching the brown both inside and out.  

I’m not wild about shopping.  It’s something that has to be done, but I’m not inclined to linger. Get in, get it done, get out. Jim still shakes his head in wonder at our epic forty-five-minute long shopping excursion to Dania where I picked out sofas, chairs, dining room set—complete with table, chairs, and buffet—office furniture, and a bedroom set.  It took longer to make delivery arrangements than it did to choose things. I picked the stuff out. Jim figured out how to put it all together.

That year, when Christmas rolled around, we asked him if he’d come help us decorate the house.

In 1985, in advance of our Christmastime wedding, putting together that first Christmas was a challenge.  Joining our two families’ separate styles of decorating for and celebrating the holidays was one of the first stumbling blocks in blending our families.  By 2005, when we hit on the idea of having an outsider do the decorating, it seemed like a no-brainer.

Jim has taken charge of the Christmas decorating around here ever since.  He has an artist’s eye.  He’ll place something somewhere and then stand back and study it for a while before maybe or maybe not moving it somewhere else.  This year, he was working on the living room piano.  When it was time to do the studying part, he shook his head and said, “Nope. I added one thing too many.  Now it looks like a yard sale.”

My idea of decorating would be to put a phalanx of Santa Clauses in one spot and an army of angels in another.  He doles items out judiciously until every piece of furniture, every window sill, and every table top has at least some piece of holiday magic. Old decorations come out and show up in new places and in new arrangements.  New decorations are syphoned in while some of the bedraggled old ones disappear without a trace.  This year a beloved snow globe and ceramic rocking horse didn’t appear until almost the very last minute when they turned up at the bottom of an improperly labeled box.  The light-up dachshund didn’t make the front porch cut this year but it will next year for sure.

Trust me when I say, this is not an instant process.  The Christmas gear is dragged into the garage on rolling shelving units the day before Thanksgiving. A design table made from an eight-foot door is set up as a work table in one bay of the garage. Decorating in earnest starts the day after Thanksgiving, and it takes as long as it takes—in this case until December 16.  

Watching Jim work is watching an artist at work.  This year someone asked me, “Do you tell him what to do?” Absolutely not.  Why would I? Someone else wanted to know, “Are you ever disappointed?” Same answer. Absolutely not. Having Jim decorate the house is a gift Bill and I give each other for Christmas, and it’s one we both savor. I went to the mall a few days ago and was disappointed in the decorations. Compared to Jim Hunt’s magic, what I saw in Nordstrom’s didn’t measure up.

This year, Jim was working around me as I fought my way through copy-editing purgatory.  At some point, he walked by my chair and remarked, “When you’re working this hard, you’re just no fun!” Sorry about that.

In case Jim Hunt’s name sounds eerily familiar to some of my readers, it should.  In addition to being our real decorator, he’s been Beau and Mel’s fictional interior designer in several different books.

And so, on our wedding anniversary, it’s only fitting that I should sing Jim Hunt’s praises. After all, without him and that long-gone flower shop, this wouldn’t be our wedding anniversary because Bill and I never would have met.

That’s why this blog is a big wedding anniversary shout out to Jim Hunt who really is, as Charles Dickens would say, “the author of the feast.”

And speaking of Charles Dickens, for everyone who’s reading this?  As Tiny Tim would say, “God bless us every one.”

Bill, Judy, and Jim