The Twelve Days of Christmas: Silver Bells Where They Belong

I’ve written several posts about my grandfather’s clock, which my parents kept for many years and which I now have in my home. I forgot to wind the clock before I went on a weekend trip this summer, and it ground to a halt while I was away. The chimes stopped on a different hour than the hands, so the venerable old clock got out of sync. I tried to get it going again, but I must have done something contrary to 1870s technology. I couldn’t get the clock to run for more than a few hours at a time.

After a few weeks of tinkering with it, I hauled the clock off to an antique clock repair shop on the other side of the Kansas City metropolitan area from where I live. They’d made a house call for me in the summer of 2015 when I moved the clock to my house. But this time, they didn’t offer that service. I was fearful of doing more harm to the clock in my car, so I talked to the proprietor before I made the journey. He told me to be sure the two weights were at the top, so they wouldn’t swing around as I drove.

I did just what he told me to do, but the weights still clanged and banged with every turn and bump in the road. Not only that, but the pendulum began to tick. With the poor thing bumping and thumping and ticking and tocking, I drove the twenty miles south to the store.

“I’ll set it up, and see if it runs,” the owner said. “If it doesn’t, I’ll have to give it an overhaul.”

I agreed. The clock has been in the family since at least 1875, and it isn’t going to fail on my watch.

A week later he told me he couldn’t keep it running for more than a few minutes. Down from a few hours at my home—I must have done it damage on the drive.

I authorized him to do the overhaul, and he promised to get it back to me before Christmas.

In the last week of November the proprietor called to say it was ready, and I retrieved the clock last week. He helped me load it in my car. He’d taken off the pendulum, so at least it wouldn’t tick. It still clanged as I drove, until suddenly—ominously—the clanging stopped. Had I ruined it? Heart in my throat, I drove it back to my house.

Thankfully, it appears to be working and to be keeping time pretty well. The pendulum ticks and the chimes ring on the hour.

But there is more to this story—the part that involves the Twelve Days of Christmas.

During the 1980s, the Halls department store in Kansas City (owned by Hallmark Cards, my employer) carried Reed & Barton silver bells during the Christmas season. As I recall, each year for six years, Reed & Barton introduced two new silver bells representing two of the twelve days of Christmas. The first year, the bells had a partridge in a pear tree and a turtle dove; the next year, a French hen and a calling bird, and so forth.

For six years, I gave that year’s pair of bells to my mother for Christmas. Each year, she lined up the bells on top of the grandfather clock. And after she had all twelve silver bells, they became a regular feature of Christmas decorating in my parents’ home.

After my parents died, I found the silver bells and brought them home with me, wanting to keep them for myself and display them at Christmas time with the grandfather clock, like my mother had done.

But I lost them.

I remembered wrapping the bells in a Ziploc bag to keep them together. I remembered putting them in a box of things to mail to Kansas City. I remembered seeing them when the box arrived. And I even remembered putting them in a “safe place” where I would find them when Christmas came around. So safe I couldn’t find it again.

That was in the summer of 2015.

Each year since, I’ve looked for them, knowing they were somewhere in my house. I looked through all the boxes of my parents’ estate files. I looked through all my own Christmas decorations, in both the upstairs closet and the downstairs closet. I looked in miscellaneous boxes of stuff that I keep because I might need it someday.

I looked and I looked and I looked again.

Then last week, the day after the overhauled grandfather clock was reinstalled in my great room, I was wrapping Christmas gifts. I needed another box to ship some presents to out-of-town relatives in, so I went through a closet where I keep some empty boxes.

I pulled out a box I thought was empty, but it was too heavy to be empty. And I knew. I opened the box, and sure enough, there were the silver bells, together with a few other Christmas ornaments from my parents’ house that I had kept.

And so, the silver bells, the Twelve Days of Christmas, are now back with the grandfather clock. I decided to put them in front of the clock, rather than on top of it, as my mother always did. But they are together again, the way they were meant to be.

What have you lost and found again?

 

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3 Comments

  1. At this time I have lost one of my two phone hand sets. It is in the house somewhere but the battery must be dead as I can’t page it. Hope I find it in less time than it took for the bells.

  2. Pingback: Deadline: Epiphany, The Twelfth Day of Christmas | Theresa Hupp, Author

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