Uncommon Tapestries: Scene 3
The Elder Mother and The Christmas Rose
Uncommon Tapestries is a work of fiction.
Click here for a Brief Introduction.
Scenes of desire, fear, history, current event, myth, legend, fable, poetry, charm, and story intermingle freely here threaded by fate with the strings of will.
Each scene can stand alone,
But together they make a wondrous treasury of days.
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Cover Art
Allegorical "Millefleurs" Tapestry with Animals (Detail), Belgium (Flanders), c. 1530-45, wool and silk weave, Minneapolis Institute of Art. This image is in the public domain.
The Elder Mother and The Christmas Rose
Alexa was sitting in the tapestry room late on Christmas Eve drinking a cup of elderberry tea and studying the tapestry in the low light and the quiet stillness. Other than herself1 and a small team of security guards, no one else was on the premises as everyone had gone home for the holidays.
Technically, it was difficult to say where her home was if not the place that she was living. But the expectation among her co-workers had been that she would go “home” to visit family for the holidays. In that sense, her home was in Wyoming, one of the Yellowstone States.2 Not in one of the world-famous cities, home to the unfathomably wealthy, such as Jackson Hole, but a quiet, lesser known town called Rawlins that nonetheless benefited from the wealth of the region relative to the rest of the former United States. She had not grown up there, but her mother, retired now, had a job opportunity 10 years ago that had been too good to pass up, relocated to the state for work, qualified for a Green Card and stayed.
Wyoming was 33 hours away by train. It might as well be across the world.
She looked at the tapestry and thought of what it would mean to go “home for the holidays” in the era in which it was made. How different things were then. Did people genuinely imagine that individual personal vehicles would always be the primary mode of transportation or that other means of instant connection—leisure flights in airplanes, globally connected personal “smart phones”—would remain ubiquitous and accessible to future generations? She laughed and took another sip of tea.
Elder—bark, leaves, flowers, berries—was used to dye the wools in the tapestry giving it many of its colours. Alexa thought about the processes involved as she looked at a particularly deep shade of violet used in the floral blooms that made up the background of the piece.
As it happens, both American elder and European elder are prolific in Three Rivers. The American shrub likes to grow along the river banks, and there are plenty of those in the area, but both varieties are prized for the protection against viral illnesses that they so generously extend to humankind, to wildlife, to cattle, and to pets. It’s not that elderberry builds up the immune system in the way that vitamins might. Rather, it uniquely offers itself as a temporary shield around healthy cells that viruses simply struggle to break through.3 What’s the saying? “Cuppa elder a day to keep the doctor away.” True or not, it was a simple enough ritual. She took another sip.
Legend has it that it is the spirit of the elder tree, Elder Mother, who enchants the tapestry anew each year as she moves through the dyes on the woollen threads on Christmas Eve.
Alexa made a note:
Our Lady4 at the center is the tapestry’s Guardian Gatekeeper, but there may be a relationship of some kind between her and Elder Mother who may also act in a Guardian Gatekeeper capacity, unseen, but present throughout.
She looked up in time to briefly witness a bonus scene. A large pearlescent rose had bloomed to reveal the birth of a gentle child, one who surely would speak throughout his life only in poems inspired by love, pulled from the sea, caught on the air, held in moonlight, or imparted by the sun.
She thought of the renewal legend and sipped her tea as the rose closed and distant dogs barked at some disturbance in the night.
Author’s Note
I hope you enjoyed the Christmas special. Thank you for reading. Wishing you and yours warmth and goodness throughout the season.
Uncommon Tapestries will be paused until after the new year.
Solstice blessings to you, glad yule, happy Christmas, and merry midwinter.
Alexa, also known as Alex, most often uses they/them pronouns, but sometimes they feel more she/her, and sometimes more he/him. During Winter Solstice and Christmas, they tend toward she/her, for example. By the time New Year rolls around, they tend toward he/him. As the month of January gets underway, they move back to a they/them center. This is not uncommon for people in her time.
The Yellowstone States include Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. The Yellowstone States are unique among the new nations of the former United States in that it is the only nation without port cities or direct access to a large body of water, an ocean, the gulf, or the the Great Lakes. This has pros and cons. One of the economic advantages is that the Yellowstone States did not suffer the same inestimable and generationally devastating losses of land and life that coastal regions experienced during the final melting of the polar ice caps.
This is not medical advice.