After the chaos of Christmas breezes by and we’re left to sit in the quiet with only the soft glow of Christmas tree lights, the familiar warmth of holiday music and a bottle of wine, it can bring a lot of memories to mind.

This Christmas as I did that, I noticed our Christmas tree skirt. It’s nothing special, really — just a red circle with furry white trim. I enjoy its simplicity and the story it represents.

I still have the tree skirt we had when we were first together for Christmas, and it takes me back to Christmases when times were much more financially difficult, in those earlier years of raising hogs. Still, in our struggle to become successful on the farm, those were some of the best Christmases I can remember — when that struggle was a lot more real.

One year after our children had grown, I was trying to think of an extra-special gift for them. I wanted to sew them something, but my sewing skills were better suited at the time for blue jean mending jobs that required super-human elbow grease and unyielding athletic prowess. My skills did not allow for sewing something delicate — and my machine needle stash held nothing smaller than those used to sew bear hides together.

So I called on our neighbor lady, a quilter who single-handedly kept the local fabric store in business. At the time especially, our children thought of this lady and her husband as their third set of grandparents, and they spent a lot of time together when we had hogs over there. So when I asked her if she would sew tree skirts for our kids, I hoped she would say “yes.”

She reacted like a typical grandparent — agreeing to do it almost before my request had rolled off of my tongue. She seemed excited about it, so I left her to her creative vices.

When I first gazed upon the finished products, it was once again obvious to me that she knew our children well.

The one she made for our daughter was so simply elegant — almost beyond our daughter’s years — with shimmering fabric featuring close-up pine branches and pine cone patterns on it, and accompanying pieces were of deep wine-colored, shimmery, softly-patterned pieces. I could hardly stop looking at it.

The tree skirts she made for each of our boys were more whimsical in nature, with the overall theme for both being a well-known and loved cartoon-based Christmas.

You could tell she was a quilter and seasoned at putting various printed fabrics together to breathe life into something spectacular.

Whenever I’ve tried that, it sends people to the garage looking for the empty vodka bottle in the recycling that could have been the culprit for something that looked so disagreeable.

She sewed those Christmas gifts together with love, knowing that those tree skirts would go into a time that she may or may not see. It was the hope of both that grandmotherly neighbor and me that our children would think of her every Christmas when they used those tree skirts, and that they would be a way she could always be with them at a time when family is so important.

For all of their growing-up years, it wasn’t so much this woman’s presents, but her presence that mattered to our children — though she often gave them plenty of both in all kinds of forms. And now she had sewn them something that would take her with them into the future, even if only at Christmas time … both now, and when eternity arrives.

They were simple gifts with epic meaning; and our children are creating their own family Christmas memories on top of those hand-made tree skirts all these years later. Maybe someday their children will be old enough to know about the woman behind those tree skirts, and her love for them — imagined through story, as it could only be to that next generation.

There isn’t much that a grandmother — or a mother — wants more than that.

Karen Schwaller writes from her grain and livestock farm near Milford. She can be reached at kjschwaller@outlook.com. Note new address.