Our Christmas trees have always been special. One year, my husband and daughter (who was really young at the time) bought the last tree at a local Food Lion store on Christmas Eve, so it would be in a home for Christmas. We get a real tree every year now.
Our Christmas tree this year (2012) with it snowing outside, a rare white Christmas in North Texas.
After getting the tree set up in the house, came the decorations. This year, we had all LED lights on the tree, I like them because they burn cooler than the old traditional incandescent lights. We had a string of musical lights that the kids loved when they were little, but after 20 years of being stored in hot attics for most of the year, when I plugged them in this year, the lights didn't work and the songs, while they worked, sounded off, like they were slowed down. Last year, I got some motion activated lights that run on batteries and play music at an after Christmas sale at Kroger. The only thing was that the cats would often run under the tree, set off the lights and the music would start to play, This happened so much that I set the lights to just come on without the music. When I was a kid, we used sets of C-7 bulbs and they were so hot that they dried the tree out. I have a set, but haven't used them in a long time. The nice thing about them is that if one bulb burned out, the whole string wouldn't go out and they were easy to replace, but they are just too hot.
Next I put on the garlands, we have lots of bead garlands, but every year, I always find some after I get the ornaments up, but I put them on anyway.We also have icicle garlands, puff ball garlands and some tear-drop-shaped bead garlands that came from my mom's house. We even have a garland with colored fish on it. There are also the traditional tinsel garlands and thank goodness the cats leave those alone. I also have a twisted bead garland from the 1980's when those kind of beads were the style, but it's a little heavy to put on the tree.
My mom always had an order to decorating the tree, first the lights, then the garlands, then the ornaments, then the tinsel. Of course we haven't used tinsel in years. For some reason, cats like to eat tinsel. Why they'll eat that and not the canned cat food I serve them, I don't know, but they find tinsel to be tasty, then they regurgitate it and then it has to be cleaned up. The cats wouldn't touch the canned food I gave them tonight. The worst part about tinsel is that it can wrap around a cat's intestine and kill it, so it's better not to hang tinsel at all. I remember that in the 60's, trees just dripped with tinsel, we had tinsel in the late 1960's that was turquoise on one side and gold on the other of each strand. I don't even think stores sell tinsel anymore. I don't miss it, I'd much rather have healthy kitty cats.
Here's a picture of my brother in front of our Christmas tree in 1960.
Family Christmas Tree 1970, a few of these ornaments were on our tree in 2012.
Family Christmas Tree 1970, a few of these ornaments were on our tree in 2012.
The ornaments are the fun part. It's fun to take them out of the storage box and unwrap them and find ornaments I'd forgotten about. I like our tree better than those fancy department store Christmas trees because our Christmas tree is special with all of the unique ornaments adorning it. Some of the ornaments have little stories behind them. There are ornaments that my kids made when they were little. There's one made out of Popsicle sticks glued so it looks like a star with gold glitter on it. There's one Jeffrey made that is like a permanent ginger cookie in the shape of a star that smells like ginger and has green glitter on it. There's one that Stacy made when she was 3 which is a opaque, frosted plastic cup with a pipe cleaner through it so it looks like a bell. There are ornaments with my kids' pictures in them when they were little. There's a plaster Santa Claus with a few daubs of red paint on it, made by Jeffrey in 1991. There's a clear ornament that Stacy drew a reindeer on with metallic paint pens. There are a couple of ceramic ornaments that my kids decorated with glaze and then were baked in a kiln at MJDesigns. There's a ceramic ornament that I decorated with hummingbirds that was also glazed. The ornament Jeffrey painted, he said, was a picture of a tornado, he was fascinated by tornadoes at the time.
There's an ornament. a multi-colored glass ball, that I bought at a Ben Franklin Five and Dime store at an after Christmas sale for 5 cents in the late 1960's when I was going from school to my grandma's apartment. There was a strip shopping center that I would go through on my way to her apartment. The people who ran the five and dime were friends of ours and were real nice. There are a few ornaments from the tree my grandmother used to put up on the little tree she had in her apartment. They are little carolers in little glitter balls. My grandmother gave us her little artificial tree when we got married and that was the tree we used for several years. It is still up in our attic. I used to put it up in the upstairs living room after we moved to the house in McKinney, but Jeff uses that table now. There's also a Courier and Ives Christmas ornament that I got from Buckeye Letter Service when I worked there, but I don't put it on the tree because it's large and fragile and it has spots on it from much time spent in a hot attic. There is also a set of wooden ornaments that my mom got for us when the kids were little and we put all non-breakable ornaments on the tree.
There are a few ornaments from the Christmas tree I sent to Steve for his first Christmas in Fort Worth, before we were married, when I was still in Ohio. I couldn't imagine him having Christmas without a Christmas tree, so I sent him a little artificial tree and some ornaments, along with a little plastic manger scene to put under the tree.
There are lots of ornaments that I got from various craft stores like MJDesigns, Hobby Lobby, Michaels and Garden Ridge as well as a craft store that used to be in what is now an office building on Collins in Arlington. I got a discount when I worked at Hobby Lobby, MJDesigns and Michaels and that came in handy at the after-Christmas sales. There's a 'tree cookie' ornament that I bought from the Heard Museum. A 'Tree Cookie' is a section of tree trunk cut away and it looks like a cookie. You can count the rings and know how old the tree was and that tree cookie is from a tree that was at the Heard, so a part of the Heard is on our Christmas tree. Also, there is a snowman made from a tree branch from the Heard when Stacy was supervising a kids' craft project at the Heard. These bits of branches were in little kits and you could make one of them into a wooden snowman ornament. I made a snowman from one of the left-over little kits. There are also metal ornaments shaped like moons, stars and other interesting shapes.and the little animal ornaments like lizards that I bought at the Heard Museum gift shop.
There is the collection of ornaments I got at Ikea, they are fuzzy snowflakes in a number of colors, there are red ones, turquoise ones, pink ones, green ones, etc. There are several collections of plastic icicles, some are white, some are clear and bluish. There are a few ornaments from the 1960's when my brother and I were little kids. There is a plastic acorn and a blue plastic bell with stripes that is from 1958 when my brother and I were toddlers and my mom didn't want ornaments broken so she got all plastic ones. There's a little elf in a sitting position from the 1960's, that I see retro copies of now-a-days, but this is an original. There are two little clear plastic ornaments (in 3-D versions of a hexagon -Dodecahedrons), one with a caroler inside, one with a Santa-like elf inside from around 1967. There is a little plastic ball of pine needles with tiny plastic poinsettias mixed in that I used to hang on the lamp in my room during the hollidays in the 1960's-1970's. There are a couple of bells made out of yarn that my Grandma Briggs crocheted and a pair of ice skates made out of yarn with paper clips for the blades, that Steve's Grandma Murphy crocheted.
There are a number of ornaments that I made, including clear ornaments that I bought at Hobby Lobby. I pour acrylic paint and glitter in the inside of them and swished it around. Then I let them dry. On one of them, I drew a scribbly Christmas tree with a paint pen. There are a couple of Origami cranes that I made and one that a friend of mine from JCPenney made for Stacy. There is also an ornament I made of lace from a kit from Michael's like a snowflake, only I didn't want to put stiffener on it like the instructions said. There's a snowflake ornament that I made from beads and pipe cleaners like the two snowflakes that I had bought at a church bazaar in the 70's, one was blue and white and the other was red and white, mine was multi-colored because that was the colors of beads I had gotten from MJDesigns. I just wanted to see if I could make one like them and I did. Also, hanging on the tree, is a butterfly ornament that I made from a kit I got at Michael's.
There are also ornaments from an ornament exchange at the Art Club of McKinney's yearly Christmas party There's one with a paintbrush and palette, covered in white sparkly glitter. There's another one of a beautiful glass deer. There's another real pretty, fragile, ceramic ornament that I got one year and that gets put up on the mantle.
There are some ornaments I got from my family.There's a stuffed cow that one of my brothers-in-law gave my husband and I after we first got married and moved to Texas. There's an ornament that is two little birds in a nest that my mother-in-law gave to Steve and I for the first Christmas we were married.There are a couple of little mice on an old-time phone receiver - one for Jeff and one for Stacy, that my mother-in-law gave them years ago. There are also two little wooden angels, one a boy and one a girl that she gave them one year. there are a couple of ornaments on the tree that she made when she used to do crafts. There are a few clear plastic ornaments that my mother-in-law gave to us that came free in cans of coffee in the 1980's. There's a Santa and Mrs. Santa that my mother-in-law made while she was into arts and crafts, also we have a macrame wreath that she made.
One year, when we lived in Arlington, the family across the street didn't have any money for Christmas, so the mother and daughter baked up a batch of ornament cookies, painted them up real pretty and went around the neighborhood selling them. We bought a number of them, including a Santa Clause, a wreath, a candle and a little troll head.
There's a big, round Santa Claus head that hangs on our tree that a copy chief at Color Tile had given to the writers at the Color Tile headquarters where I worked at the time. One of the writers gave hers to me for Jeff (before Stacy was born). The other writer that received one ended-up depositing it on the window ledge and watching what visiting birds did with it. That copy chief was a classic 'Yuppie' and was not real popular with his writers. There's also a carousel horse ornament that I bought from someone selling them at the Color Tile HQ.
Fish ornament I got at World Market
There's a little ornament of a toy horse on a stick (I think you call it a 'hobby horse) that a friend of mine from Color Tile gave to Jeff (before Stacy was born). She also later gave me several little reindeer ornaments that are still used as tree decorations. There are numerous animal ornaments, including some beautiful fish ornaments that I think I got at World Market. There's also a balsa wood giraffe that I got there that I've had repair a couple of times and have to be very careful when I pack it. I also have a wooden shark and a wooden frog (that had to be repaired this year). There's a beautiful glass ornament with a picture of an eagle in flight on it that we got on our trip out west to Colorado in 2007. There's also a ceramic oranment with lizards painted on it that we got in Santa Fe, New Mexico on our trip there in 2007. There's a glass kitty ornament that we bought at a store in McKinney called 'Sweet Caroline's."
Balsa wood giraffe
There's an ornament that has an interesting story behind it. When my mother died, I donated a bunch of her handkerchiefs to the church that helped us out and they made them into angels for people in nursing homes to hang in their tree or as a decoration. One handkerchief said "mother' in pink and white embroidery and they sent that one to me in my mother's memory. There are also two doves from memorial services for those who passed away a certain year. There's one with Steve's grandma's name on it and one with my mom's name on it. They are very special.
This is made from one of my mother's handkerchiefs that was given to me by the ladies from the Mifflin Presbyterian Church in memory of my mother.
Our Christmas tree last year
This is an ornament we had on our tree when I was a kid.
It is now put on our tree every year.
There is a little engraved ornament with Kandy's name on it. Kandy was our Golden Retriever/Corgi mix who had to be put the sleep in 2008 because of cancer. I bought the ornament around Christmas the year we adopted her, in 2004. The only ornament I could find was one of a little bitty white-haired dog, but I got it anyway and had it engraved. Kandy was our first dog.
There's the little hand-blown glass bird we got at Six Flag's Holiday in the Park one night, just after Christmas. It was a night that the weather service was predicting a big ice storm, but since we lived so close to Six Flags, we knew we could get home quickly if it started to sleet. There was hardly anybody there that night. The ice storm never came and we had a wonderful time.
One time, in the 1970's, when my brother worked at Cockrell's restaurant in Westerville, there was a cool old flea market set up in an old theater, right down the street from where he worked. I wanted to get some really old Christmas ornaments so I went looking in there for some and found 3 very old bird ornaments. I still hang them on the tree, but the beak has broken off of one of them.
I used to have a plastic partridge covered in real feathers, that came with a set of plastic pears. One year, our Christmas tree got dumped over because Princess, a cat we had at the time, tried to catch the partridge. After that, I didn't hang birds in the tree that had real feathers on them.
I also like to hang one of my little stuffed bats in the tree just because I like bats and think they're cute. It's not a Christmas ornament, but it's really cool..
A plushie Stacy made one year for one of her friends.
There's also a little dragon that's not a Christmas ornament, but I put it in the tree because it's so cool. I got it at the Harbor Book Store behind Graeter's Ice Cream in Westerville, Ohio in the summer of 2011. Graeter's Ice Cream used to be Cockrell's restaurant where my brother used to work . That's probably the last time we will be in Ohio for a long time, due to the fact we can no longer take two weeks to go up to Ohio and I think the book store as since closed due to financial reasons.
The dragon is in the upper right hand corner.
Our tree top angel I got at half-price at Hobby Lobby when I worked there. She has been at the top of our tree for a number of years. There's no real special story behind her, except that I got her for a really good price at Hobby Lobby and she looks really pretty up there.
There are so many ornaments on our tree with stories behind therm and when I hang them on the tree each year and see them hanging on the tree, I remember those stories when I see those ornaments and that's a small part of what makes Christmas special for me. Each and every year, our Christmas tree has a unique collection of memories and more are made every year.
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