“I moved it over here. There are several teapots.”
There it was. The memorable stained-glass teapot. “It’s a lamp?” She reached around back and found the cord. “I’ll be.”
“If your friend collects teapots, she would probably enjoy it.”
“True, but I kind of had my heart set on giving her one to add to her collection as a Christmas gift.” Sheila looked at the other teapots displayed. “I don’t see anything that’s really grabbing me.”
“Well, I do have another one. It’s sort of playful, but I really like it and it has a Christmas theme.”
“You’ve got me interested.” Sheila followed the woman overtwo aisles to a section filled with glass-front hutches. The clerk pulled out a small teapot from a cabinet, cradling it between her hands like a precious baby bird.
“This,” she said, “is so sweet. See the scene with the man selling chestnuts on the street, and the Merry Christmas wish on the top?”
“Did you say chestnuts?” Sheila couldn’t believe her luck. “It’s perfect. Sold.”
“Wonderful!” The woman closed the cabinet. “I can take it up front for you if you’d like to look around.”
“That’s all I need today, and this is the perfect gift. Did you know there used to be like a billion American chestnut trees up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia until the turn of the twentieth century? They were abundant and huge, like the great redwoods out West until blight wiped them out.”
“I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never heard of that.”
“I know,” Sheila said. “I just learned about it over the summer. I have a friend that moved up there.” She was glad she’d listened as Natalie droned on and on about the local lore of Chestnut Ridge. “Chestnuts used to be the main cash crop there.”
“I had no idea.” The clerk wrapped the teapot in decorative tissue paper. “Do you need a box for this? I think I have one in the back that this would tuck right into.”
“That would be so helpful.”
The woman went to get the box, leaving Sheila to mill around the collectibles and primitives near the register.
Sheila picked up a mercury-glass Christmas ornament piled with others in a big glass bowl. There were a few scuffs on it, but it wasn’t a reproduction. Her family used to have ornaments like this on their Christmas tree when she was growing up. The funkymagenta, turquoise, and gold paint all joined in the middle of the deep inset with the mica stencils looked vintage.
“Here we go. It fit perfectly.” The woman carried a shiny white box with gold trim on the edges to the counter.
“That’ll do the trick. Thank you.” Sheila picked up the bowl of ornaments. “Are these vintage? It’s so hard to tell.”
“I can give you a couple of key pointers on that. First, check out the cap. See how small the opening is? Most of the mass-produced ornaments have a wide cap. These early blown-glass ornaments from Germany and Poland have a much narrower opening. Second, the cap won’t have any decoration. It’ll have a plain metal cap. And third, if there’s glitter, it’s not vintage. It should be mica, which is a stone product that glistens like glitter, but is actually fine irregular-shaped dust. These look like the real deal to me.” The woman sifted through the box, removing two of them. “I’d skip these two. This one is cracked and I’m not so sure that one is vintage. I can give you a deal on the rest.”
“I’ll take them too, then.” Sheila was delighted with the buys.
She drove home in a much better mood for having checked off everything on her shopping lists. The exercise probably helped too.
When she got home, she wrapped Orene’s gift in a pretty red toile-patterned paper she’d bought from the neighbor kids in a fundraiser. A bit overpriced, but for a good cause. It was solid on one side and decorative on the other, and the texture was thick and sturdy. She fluffed the bow on top of Orene’s present. Not wanting to waste the remnants, she pulled up a DIY on her phone on how to make a gift bag out of the scraps. It wasn’t that difficult. In fact, the bag turned out so cute, she fashioned three more just like it.
You can never have too many bags for Christmas.
Last week, she’d purchased spa-day-escape gift cards for her agents at the salon in the opulent Hotel Jefferson. These bags seemed the right size for those. She hopped up from her chair and ran into her office to see if they’d fit. Each had been tucked into a fancy gold envelope with a glittery snowflake sticker seal. The envelopes fit right inside the red toile bags.
“So cute!”
She couldn’t wait to hand them out at the office party. Time was going to go quickly with everything going on.
Countdown to Christmas fun in Chestnut Ridge: Thirteen days.
Chapter Five
Sheila wished she’d trusted her instincts and planned to go to Chestnut Ridge on Thursday. She knew Friday the thirteenth was not worth tempting. First, she hadn’t made it halfway down the block before she had to stop and put the seat belt across her purse and laptop in the passenger seat to stop the insistent warning sound. Apparently, anything over a certain number of pounds, whether it had a heartbeat or not, required a seat belt. And now it wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning yet and she was in standstill traffic on a two-lane road with nothing but open fields around her. Stuck.
She craned her neck, trying to figure out what the holdup was, but she was behind one of those big eighteen-wheelers and couldn’t see a thing.
