O Christmas Tree

Alyssa 2009

Katherine hangs her graduation tassel on the tree.

Alyssa 2011, Thirteen years old.

Katherine made this when she was three years old.

Doesn't everybody have cardboard bacon on their Christmas tree?

These have always been on my tree. They are the only remaining pieces of a dollhouse set made for me and my sisters as children by my Aunt. It was a medieval castle, with a whole set of handmade people.

I saved all the birthday cake toys for years not really knowing what to do with them until it occurred to me that they could be part of our Christmas tree. The kids get a kick out of this. We used to have Tommy and Angelica, as well as Chuckie, but they have been lost along the way.

I still have the gum wrappers and name tags.

Some of the many ornaments the kids have made through the years. Rudolph lost one of his antlers this year when I took him out of the box.

My Grandmother made these butterflies out of national geographic magazines. She passed away last year. I think about her when I see these on my tree. They are getting a little ragged looking but that's ok.

My Sports collection. Tony Gwynn and Pudge Rodriguez are wishing you a Merry Christmas!

I opened up one of the boxes of ornaments and began to sort through the contents, laying the ones we wanted to use on the table and leaving the broken and unwanted ones in the box. Katie and Ally were hanging the colored glass balls on the tree while I sorted and separated the "special" ornaments. After almost twenty years of marriage we have a lot of "special" ornaments.
Actually it goes back further than that. When I was 17 and living with my Auntie Kathy we didn't have much money. I was in high school and she was working at Hickory Farms at the mall. We lived on Navy beans and the leftover brots she brought home from the store at night. Christmas came around and we had few ornaments. We jokingly started walking around the house hanging ordinary things on the tree. We laughed about it. When the next year rolled around we used those "ornaments" again. What started out as a joke became a tradition. I saved all those ornaments and they have been on my tree since I got married almost twenty years ago. They are: about ten Big Red gum wrappers (now laminated so they will last forever), my "Seniors 86" garter from my high school senior pep rally, some name tags from various places we worked including some Jack in the Box stuff which I added a couple of years later. (Cardboard bacon! doesn't everybody have cardboard bacon on their tree? Also this collection has grown through the years and now we have a whole slew of different Jack heads and poseable "Jack" dolls).
The kids have never known anything different, they don't question why we have gum wrappers on the tree. Over the years many things have been added. Birthday cake toys, and wax number candles from their birthday cakes, Easter basket decorations, pieces of Halloween costumes, all have found a place on my tree, along with very old ornaments that belonged to my great grandmother and my grandmother, and my favorite sports memorabilia. We have poseable "Tony Gwynn" baseball player, a "Pudge", some Ranger and Padre Christmas balls. This year to celebrate the retirement of baseball great Trevor Hoffman I am going to place my favorite TH baseball card next to Tony Gwynn. Then there is the very special ornament that signifies the beginning of Christmas every year as Dad places it oh-so-carefully on the tree-the Dallas Cowboys Christmas ball. ( I think this year he might just throw it at the tree instead of hanging it oh-so-carefully. He's not happy with the 'boys.)
This year we added Katie's tassel from her graduation cap to the tree, right next to mine and her father's.
In just a little over a year we will add Matthew's tassel. We have a multitude of handmade ornaments ranging from the beautifully carved intricate Santa Clause that Auntie Kathy carved from a tree branch, a hand painted pair of dollhouse people, made for me and sisters when we were children for our medieval castle: a monk and a nun, and the only two  dollhouse "people" to survive our childhood, to the paper snowflakes with the kids pictures in them from Kindergarten, first grade, second grade...
There is even a wooden camel that Matthew's kindergarten teacher, Ms. Kloppers, brought back from a trip to Israel.
As I unpacked the ornaments the girls were oohing and ahhing around me as the decorations came out of the box. "Remember this"  was exclaimed over and over as they perused our Christmas past. Our regular Christmas tree trimming party has begun to be a journey into the past, even for the kids. I snapped a picture of Katie holding up a painted fun foam Christmas tree that she painted when she was three years old. Matthew was two and he remembers painting his Christmas bell. They are taller than me now, and surely smarter, and it takes my breath away to realize how fast all those Christmas's added up into a lifetime of memories.
Katie left to go back to college for her finals this week and Ally and Matt have been busy with school so most of the ornaments are still on the table, awaiting their transformation from junk on the table to treasured tree ornament. I got to thinking about it today, it might not be everybody's cup of tea, I wouldn't trade our "life" tree for the most beautiful ordinary Christmas tree in the world.