Christmas Day for much of the world, and a day when much of that world is focused on gifts. Despite the accuracy of all the criticisms of society’s crass commercialism, the gift-giving motif appears prominently in the story of the refugee infant whose birth the day is supposed to celebrate and honor: the magi, bestowing the trappings of royalty upon a newborn infant of Indigenous birth who entered this world in the humblest of surroundings.
Here, the greatest gifts are associated not with royalty, but with the spirits.
Regarded in that light, this is indeed the season of giving here, one in which, in a good year, the volume is greatest and their use longest-lasting. And like today’s all new featured work, which has arrived just in time for the holidays, the spirits of the season delivered our greatest gift on Christmas Eve — that perfect present of winter: snow at midnight.
In truth, it arrived near afternoon’s end, and delivered a steady cascade of crystal flakes well into the morning hours. Now, the land rests beneath a blanket of new snow several inches thick, and the rays of a brilliant sun’s light, too. The last has not been a constant; the day has passed thus far in a spiraling dance of stormclouds and sun the former refusing to depart before its kin arrives tonight, the latter insisting on showing its face nonetheless.
In short, the season has given us this day a world of staggering beauty, one equaled by the blues of night to come.
And in the throes of a snowstorm, evening is indeed blue here. As the last bit of light receded yesterday, I walked outside with my camera to catch the magic of holiday lights in the snowy dark. As I trudged around the house, snow already up to the ankles of my winter boots, I thought how like Wings’s newest masterwork our small world looked, and how apt was its name. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Winter: Snow At Midnight Necklace
This is the season of winter snow at midnight, shimmering ice against the darkest of blues. With a masterwork that evokes the beauty of these coldest, darkest hours, Wings launches the first in an extraordinary new collection to come, one to honor the four seasons, a series of four necklaces flowering in the shades and spirits of their time. The pendant is a bold classic motif that extends to the Sacred Directions, both eight-pointed star and opening flower, each ray and petal arrayed around a slightly ovaled central orb. The larger cabochons, arrayed to the cardinal directions, manifest as wintry teardrops in stunning shades of royal blue amid a profusion of shimmering silvery pyrite. The center stone is an almost perfect indigo, aswirl with velvety lines and whorls of deeper blue. The smallest cabochons, teardrops extending to the ordinal points, are high-grade lapis lazuli in a flawless, matrix-free cobalt blue. Each of the nine blue jewels is set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed with twisted silver; the bezel’s backing, saw-cut entirely freehand and extending just beyond the edges of the stones, is stamped free-hand all the way around the perimeter with small spirits of pure magic, tiny winter butterflies to carry the snow on their wings. The pendant hangs from a hand-made bail, flared at the top and gently tapering at either end, hand-stamped in a matching eight-pointed star motif. The entire dazzling piece is suspended from a graduated strand of gemstones over sterling silver bead chain: Large ultra-high-grade icy moonstone orbs alternate with shining silver-plated spheres of like size as the focal beads, thence with smaller dark blue lapis lazuli and silver-plated beads extending up either side, flowing into tiny rounds of midnight-blue dumortierite and crystalline violet-blue iolite separated by faceted silver-plated coin beads. Pendant hangs 5″ long including bail (4/5″ long without) by 3-5/8″ across at the widest point; bail itself is 7/8″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point. Large cabochons (north and south) are 1-1/2″ long by 13/16″ across at the widest point; medium cabochons (east and west) are 1-1/16″ long by 5/8″ to 3/4″ across at the widest point; small cabochons (ordinal points) are 11/16″ long by 5/16″ across at the widest point. Bead strand hangs 22″ long. [All dimensions approximate.] Designed jointly by Wings and Aji; first in The Four Seasons Series. Additional views shown above and below.
Sterling silver, lapis lazuli (pendant); moonstone; silver plate;; lapis lazuli; dumortierite; iolite (beads)
$2,000 Plus shipping, handling, and insurance
Even in the morning light, winter here tends toward blue: the slate shades of the clouds, now racing fast, now still and lowering; the hints of cornflower to which the winds give space, however momentarily; the shadows upon the snow once the sun shows itself full force. But the blues of a winter’s night are different: indigo, cobalt, violet, midnight — underlit, occasionally, by plum and crimson at the western horizon, then pierced by the silver of starlight and softened by the shimmering ice of the moon.
It’s a moment, or a night of them, of pure magic, of mystery as a cloudy deep and yet aswirl with hints of crystal clarity. It’s medicine — the First Medicine, water, delivered not as an immediate, temporary bounty, nor as seasonal charity, alms for the poor, but rather, the gift of life itself for yet another year.
That it arrives, occasionally, so beautifully wrapped is yet one more small gift, one that grows by virtue of its impression upon our fragile senses: memory, joy, nostalgia, gratitude . . . and perhaps a bit of melancholy, of the sort that calls us to appreciate it all the more now.
This work holds similar magic, and similar lessons, too. It is a star, icy and shimmering against the late blues of night: eight-pointed, a traditional tool of navigation and means of reckoning to and within the Sacred Directions. And yet, it holds the promise of warmer winds, too, a premonitory collection of petals in full winter flower, bearing the promise of life to come.
In this place, snow is the greatest gift of all; the accumulated snowpack of the cold season becomes the single largest provider of water to the land year-round. But on this day, after an extraordinarily difficult season, one in which last night was our first real chance to rest, even for a moment? That promise held and delivered by that unfolding flower, petals of snow in the blues of darkest midnight, seems like a “greatest gift,” as well.
To all those who observe or celebrate today, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and may the New Year bring you, too, all the gifts of a life well lived.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
