Post-Christmas sentimentality.... *sigh*

This year's new ornaments

I finally got around to packing up the last of the Christmas decorations yesterday.  I am usually relatively late doing this task because I love the Christmas season and I like the way our home looks with its seasonal decorations.  As I have previously established, I am not much of a decorator, and we are not overly elaborate, even at Christmas, so things just kind of blend in.  However, when there are more needles on the floor than on the tree, and cobwebs start forming on the nativity scenes, it is time to pack things up for another 11 months.

As I have done for the past couple of years, I took stock of things as I was putting them away.  If you know me, you know that I am a sentimental person, and it is difficult for me to part with things.  However, I tried to look critically at our Christmas things and I weeded a few things out, things that hold no particular sentimental value other than that we have always had them.  I am proud to say that I have half a shopping bag of items that I can live without. 

My most favourite Christmas decoration is our tree.  We have a lot of ornaments.  A LOT.  The year my husband and I first met, we tentatively exchanged Christmas ornaments, cheap and wooden, which we bought at the downtown Eaton’s store in Winnipeg.  The next year, we were planning our wedding, and the tradition continued.  When our children were born, we included them; my mother also made them ornaments every year until a few years ago.  Everyone has a theme: my husband’s is polar bears, our son’s is sheep, our daughter’s theme is angels, and birds for me.  Occasionally, we stray from the theme, but the point is that because of this tradition, we have a lot of ornaments.  One day when our kids each have their own homes, their ornaments will disappear from our tree, and it will seem very bare. 

We have a real tree, and recycle it when we are done.  We need a big tree with lots of branches, of course, and some years we tend to overdo it.  One year, we cut our own tree, and brought it home to discover that the tree that looked

quite reasonable out in the tree lot with the other trees was actually too big for our house.  We cut the top off and installed it as best we could, but as well as being too tall, it was also extremely fat.  It was so fat that it almost totally filled the double-wide doorway from our kitchen to our living room.  After it was all decorated and lovely looking, we were playing a rousing game of Dutch Blitz in the kitchen, and we heard an almighty crash.  It was our tree.  It had not really fallen over since it was so fat at the bottom.  It was more like a loud, fast rollover.  Fortunately, only one ornament was damaged, but it was not destroyed, and it still sits on our tree every year.

This year’s tree was wrapped when my husband bought it, and once we got it inside and unwrapped, we discovered it was shaped like a scalene triangle, rather than the ideal Isosceles shape (in an aside, I think maybe that is the first time I have ever used anything from grade 11 geometry...).  In other words, it was a lot fatter on one side than the other. It was duly decorated and of course looked beautiful. 

I love our tree ornaments and all that they represent.  There are, of course, those first ornaments that my husband and I exchanged when we were “just friends” and which now represent so much more: a life shared together and a relationship as a family that has endured and evolved.  There is the handmade ornament that commemorates our first Christmas together as a married couple, and ornaments for the first Christmas of each of our children.  There are our very first ornaments, blown glass trees, birds, and bells and red plastic hearts, which we bought the first year we were married at Stermann’s, a linen shop across the street from our apartment in Westdale and augmented with other ornaments from Eaton’s in downtown Hamilton.  And there is the wooden snowman ornament that belonged to my husband when he was a child.

The vast majority of our ornaments are handmade, many of them by our children.  Like the googly angel with a photo of our daughter’s head on it, made at school or church. Or ornaments that our son made out of craft foam sheets.  The many ornaments we made together over the years represent hours of laughter and fun spent around the kitchen table.  Many years ago, we made those cinnamon applesauce ornaments with cookie cutters; this year, they finally started to go mouldy, and I had to throw them out.  We have ornaments made by kids from our “extended” families, like the cardboard Christmas trees with coloured rice glued on to them.  Every year a bit more of the rice falls off, but after 6 years, they still survive.  There is a paper star ornament made by a Danish exchange student.  We have lovely creations by a former student who lived with us for a school year.  And there are the many ornaments that my mother made, or I made, or others made, and are treasured and admired. 

There are poignant ornaments, such as the wooden sheep my dad made for my

son’s first Christmas.  My dad is not alive any more, but we feel his presence when we hang that wooden sheep on the tree.  And the beautiful pear

ornament, handpainted on watercolour paper by a former Mount Allison student who suffered a devastating head injury and had to learn how to paint again.  The pear was one of her first projects.  And this year, a glass matryoshka ornament, which reminds me of my long-gone grandmother; she always had a wooden matryoshka on her shelves that I loved, and it reminds me of my Mennonite heritage. 

Our tree has ornaments that remind us of time spent together in other places, like the paper geisha girl from Japan, where we lived for 4 months in 2000.  And the wooden bison from a Manitoba vacation which included a potentially scary encounter with some real bison in the national park, and the glass ball filled with sand and beach treasures representing a myriad of wonderful times on P.E.I.  And of course, recently added, an Ottawa REDBLACKS Grey Cup ornament

(adapted from a keychain).

Another decoration that we all love is a tree ornament, but it doesn’t actually hang on the tree.  It is a really cheap tin Christmas tree that whirls when you push in a handle to reveal a plastic Santa in the middle.  It probably cost a buck or two.  I think we have had that tree for at least 25 years.  Every year, we think it will be its last Christmas, but it survives.  It might survive us all.

Two of my favourite ornaments depict the Holy Family.  One is a cross-stitched ornament that I made, and framed in a tiny grapevine wreath.  The other was purchased from Ten Thousand Villages, a fair trade organization, and is carved from olive wood from the West Bank.  The wood is gorgeous, and the figures are graceful and evocative.  Apart from its religious significance, it has a great deal of political symbolism too... created in a region which should represent peace and tolerance but instead is filled with conflict and hatred.  I say a prayer for peace every time I see that beautiful figure.

What are your special ornaments?  What do they represent to you?
 
They are only objects, I know.  But for me, they hold so much meaning, love, and symbolism.  I am grateful for every person and every memory that they represent.