About fifteen years ago I bought my mom a Christmas ornament at the post office.
It was one of the ornaments from the White House Historical Association. They have an annual series of ornaments, which depict the White House and its Christmas traditions through the ages, usually (but not last year, 2025) through the life of the occupants of the White House in a given term. There was a stack of the ornaments on the counter when I was buying stamps or mailing a package. While I don’t remember which ornament in the series it was — it may have been the McKinley ornament, or it could have just as easily been the TR ornament — I knew it was something my mom would like.
And she did. She loved the ornament, and over the years she’d buy the ornament or I’d buy the ornament, and as sales and money allowed we’d try to backfill the ornaments and plug in gaps. We’d talk about the ornaments on the phone. She bought the Jimmy Carter ornament immediately. I bought one ornament at a Washington Nationals game, it might’ve been the Eisenhower ornament, but don’t quote me of that.
She had a special tree, dedicated just to these ornaments. There was a 19th Amendment “Votes for Women” ornament I bought for her at the Smithsonian when I was there for a day of World War I programming to mark the 100th-anniversary of the end of the war, and that ornament may have been on the White House tree, too.
When I was in Lynchburg in October and November — my dad was in the hospital twice with heart issues, and he had a doctor’s appointment — she had a flyer from the White House Historical Association, and she wanted my thoughts on which ornaments she didn’t have that she should get — “Do I get Harrison, or do I get the first Cleveland, or do I get the second Cleveland?” I think was the basic question — and she had them circled on the flyer, complete with her annotations. I don’t know that she ever settled on one; I quite liked the first Cleveland ornament. She was trying to decide for when they went on sale after Christmas, so she would be ready to order.
An email arrived from the White House Historical Association a little bit ago: Complete Your Ornament Collection With These Great Deals!
She won’t be completing her collection.
The email choked me up. I had been routinely marking the WHHA emails read without actually reading them or looking at them. I had been thinking about unsubscribing from the newsletter altogether. This one I looked at, and it hit me hard.
Grief is not linear, and it emerges from unexpected places, like the recent episode of the BBC’s Soul Music on Coldplay’s “Yellow.” (The story at the beginning of the program, about playing music at the bedside of an unconscious person, hit close to home, and I had to pause the podcast for a few minutes to get myself back together.)
She loved her White House ornaments. She was proud of them, she was proud of having them, she showed them off, and she was excited by them.
I will miss her tree.
Edited to add: I wrote what follows as a comment on a website a few days after writing this post, and it feels relevant here.
I haven’t watched The West Wing in years, not since it was on. I gave my mom the series on DVD years ago, though. It was comfort food for her.
On December 7th, which is my mom’s birthday, I went to Washington for the day. Congressional Cemetery was having an arts and crafts fair, and since I have ancestors buried there I thought I would go to the fair, get 2025’s cemetery Christmas ornament, and visit the ancestors.
I had not been able to get my mom on the phone since Thanksgiving. She wasn’t answering my calls. I don’t know why she wasn’t taking my calls, but it may have been the sheer amount of Medicare enrollment phone calls she was receiving. (When I was visiting before Thanksgiving, she was receiving a Medicare call about every two minutes. I answered one and told the person on the line to “die in a fire.”) I tried calling her from the cemetery, and she didn’t pick up. I eventually got her on the phone at 8 o’clock, and that was after five attempts throughout the day. I was at the point where I was going to give up trying to reach her, frankly.
A day or two later Facebook served me up some content about Mrs. Landingham and “Two Cathedrals” on The West Wing, which was one of my mom’s favorite episodes. She loved Bartlet cursing out God.
Mrs. Landingham died at 16th and Potomac, which is right outside the fence of Congressional Cemetery, which is not something I had ever known, and I only knew because the Facebook sent me down a rabbit hole of curiosity. (My hunch is that Sorkin had no idea that 16th and Potomac was on the opposite side of town from 16th and H, ie., the White House because the L’Enfant Plan is weird, and assumed it was somewhere near the White House.) And, having walked through that intersection a number of times over the past fifteen years, I’m not really sure how a drunk driving fatality is possible there, but I’ll let that go.
I filed this knowledge away to tell my mom when next we spoke. She would find it cool when I spoke to her next.
We never spoke again. She had a massive cerebral hemorrhage on the 12th, never regained consciousness, and died on the 14th.