Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories: Dec 3 - Tree Ornaments

Christmas is a magical time - excitement, anticipation and many enjoyed festivities go along with the season, making it a wonderful time to share with family.  Nothing gets that excitement started like decorating the house and putting up the tree.    I remember as a child growing up, after the Thanksgiving turkey was put to leftovers and the pumpkin pie was gone, it was time to decorate for Christmas! 

The tree trimming was my primarily Mom's job, but we all enjoyed looking through the ornaments, straightening the branches of our tree and helping to hang them all.   In our family every child got a new ornament every year.  My parents carefully put our names and the year on the ornament somewhere.   In those earlier years our tree didn't really have a "theme" but was more of what I would call a children's tree.   After all, Christmas was all about the children.   There were a few sets of glass ornaments that my parents had purchased over the years and we always hung those as well.  Over time, there were less and less of them, as various ones got broken.   I have two or three such ornaments from those glass bobbles that belonged to my parents when they first started their lives together.  These are among my most cherished ornaments and I put them on my tree every year.

On the first Christmas after moving from my parents home Mom pulled all of my ornaments from her boxes and gave them to me - giving me a collection of ornaments to start decorating my own tree.   

This Santa is plastic, covered with thin felt and is from 1974 and the Pooh below is from 1978.  My children give me a hard time about these every year - "Here Mom, it's that old Santa"

When my paternal Grandmother passed away in 1995 I received very few of her Christmas decorations.  But among them was this ornament which I have carefully put on my tree every year ever since.   I haven't any idea where she got it and I had never seen anything like it but it too is one of my most cherished.

Every year my ornaments get a little older and every year we add new ornaments to our tree for each of our children.  My Mom still gives me (and my kids) a new ornament every year.   When they grow up I hope that they enjoy taking them out every year, remembering the times we had trimming our tree and adding to their collections for their own children, keeping the family tradition alive.