"Reflect upon your present blessings - of which every man has many - not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. Fill your glass again, with a merry face and contented heart. Our life on it, but your Christmas shall be merry, and your new year a happy one!"
~ Charles Dickens
There must have been a time when i believed in Santa Clause. I simply don't remember it. What i do remember are the Christmas trees in the house i grew up in. Quite literally overnight, a tree would appear in the corner of our living room, almost as tall as the highest of the fireplace bricks, dazzling in its brilliance, twinkling as if by magic. For many years, it was silver, and then it was green; always with the construction paper chains wrapped around it; always with the gold, wooden faced angel at the top; always with my mother's invisible hands having made it so.
In my "adult" life, i haven't always bothered to set up a Christmas tree. My mother confessed to me recently how much she hated Christmas, in no small part because she lacked the abracadabra that could have turned a broken twig into a tree worthy of Rockefeller Center with nothing more than a blink and an arm wave. True enough, it can be a bit of a hassle to set up a Christmas tree, with all the hauling and untangling and inserting and suspending. But at this point in my life, i can't imagine getting through our dreary Pacific Northwest winters without one.
When my husband and i were just staring out in life, we were determined to have a "real" tree or no tree at all. In those days, you could get a beauty for maybe five or ten dollars, less if you waited 'till the last minute (we often did). There were never any presents under our trees back then - the tree itself was our gift to one another. Every year, we spent a good deal of time selecting ornaments that "spoke to us" somehow - a bear with a drum, a wooden duck, a ceramic half moon. We also made many ornaments out of colored paper, painted shells, or more ambitiously, stained glass. To this day, i'm using many of the collected seed pods and pine cones we used way back when to fill out the bare spots between the branches.
Last year, i finally embraced the comparative ease of an artificial Christmas tree. As i always had in the past, i "personalized" our decorations by adding a few "sentimental" mementos:
My mother's hospital birth token ...
A photo of my father as a boy ...
An earring my mother quilled back when the earth was still cooling ...
This year, my tree is a little less "sentimental" and a lot more shiny - Shiny Brite, in fact! It seems i've developed a bit of a passion for collecting vintage ornaments. A few such ornaments came out of the house i grew up in, and as of last year, i felt a sudden urge to expand that small collection. While this is a process that will undoubtedly unfold over time, a few early favorites are:
A Shiny Brite bell ...
Poland indents ...
A silver fish (from my childhood) ...
A triple indent marked USSR (upper left, also from my childhood, above the stained glass heart i made 110 years ago) ...
As wonderful as these old "collectable" ornaments are, i'll never completely surrender myself to the "vintage" theme. At this very moment, carefully selected treasures from years gone by are tucked safely into the tree branches. And this year, our tree seems especially poignant somehow. This year, our tree honors the sentiments of the past, along with the promise of a brighter future. And really, isn't that what the holidays are all about?
Have you done any holiday decorating this year? If so, please share what you've done in the comments section! And may you all enjoy a happy and healthy holiday season.