Decorating Tradition

This year when decorating the house for Christmas, the boys assured me they were much older and could handle the fragile ornaments usually relegated to adults.  So I let my seven- and eight-year-old take the delicate beauties from Mawmaw, who had retrieved them from the boxes, and hang them on the tree.  The result was a Bermuda triangle front and center where we had a parade of antique wooden ornaments, angels clumped with angels, and snowman families happily hanging together.  Individual beauty was lost, but the arrangement told a story of their imaginations and accomplishment at being able to hang the eggs handblown by my mother when I was their age.  The problem was the tree leaned forward, tilting toward their eager hands and busy minds.


So once they went to sleep, I did what my mother always did and redecorated the tree.  They were dismayed (when I read this to the older one, he corrected me by saying they were actually appalled) upon awaking the next morning, but I stood firm, letting them add a few I had taken off because my eldest's 15 years of school had produced more handmade ornaments than our tree could hold; after showing how their parade was intact, just more spread out, they were resigned.  My mom who is visiting backed me up, of course, because she had been complicit in the redecorating and, as I said, it was part of our family tradition for as far back as I can remember.  I don't think I ever graduated to the point of being allowed to handle the eggs, so my children already had an advantage on me.

To ease their adjustment to the new arrangement, I asked them to point out a few of their favorites and I told them the story of each ornament:  who gave it, when I received it, what that person meant to me.  It became a fun time of learning about their Great-Great Aunt Mimi to whose home in Texas I traveled all by myself on an airplane when I was not much older than eight and saw a prairie dog and buffalo for the first time and learned to play the guitar from my Great-Uncle Daryll.  And they learned about their Great-Great Aunt Anne Kottman from Iowa, the baby in the Martin family of 11, who sent the lovely Lenox keepsakes to commemorate their first Christmas when they were babies—Ben, my youngest, was only a month old and Knox, middle child and December baby, four days away from one year.  We talked about Granny's tree-topper, my mom's mom who died the day after their dad and I married, and how elegant her tree always appeared. And we discussed how cousin Vonda sent the three glass snowmen peaking from a package just after my third baby was born. I showed them a few of my favorite angels from their Great Aunts Mary Helen and Nana who have showered beauty on our tree, like a hint of the heavenly host who greeted the shepherds so long ago.  And the last two ornaments they pointed out were Mary on a donkey with Joseph walking beside commemorating the trying journey to our greatest gift and a boy carved out of wood who cradled a gold star, also from my Aunt Nana whose sons, too, are the treasures of her heart.

They're being prepared for hanging the ornaments another year--and next time, they can incorporate the story of the ornaments and their family heritage into their own narratives about the wooden toy solider who rode the Popsicle stick sled which knocked over the felt and button snowman on his way to the plastic Santa big brother Dylan made in 4th grade.