Christmas Memories

I recently enjoyed a friend's blog about her Christmas tree and ornaments and thought to myself how wonderful that must be to have so many memories on your tree. The more I thought about it though the more I realized that I, too, have memories on my tree. So, Lynn, I hope you don't mind that I "copy" you, but I'd like to share about our tree.

The first tree that Dennis and I had as a married couple did not last until Christmas. The reason? Our black cat, Gemima, kept jumping from the breakfast bar to the tree and knocking it down. We were lucky that our ornaments on that first tree were not the breaking kind. What were they you may ask? Well, they were actually many, many, many match boxes wrapped in left over paper from Windle's Clothing Store covered with bows made from left over yarn that I used for crewel work. I still have two of those boxes (only two because Savannah found them when she was around three and had opened all of them except two before I could get to her), and they are now stored in Santa's bag. The Santa was one of my first attempts at ceramics.



For many years afterwards, our trees were a hodgepodge of ornaments. As a teacher, I usually received ornaments for Christmas, and one year I realized that the majority of them were Santa Clauses. So when Shona Carpenter, one of Dennis's basketball players who started as a 6th grader on Warrior Academy's varsity team, gave Dennis a beautiful Santa's head ornament, I decided then and there that we would have a Santa themed tree. This is the first official Santa ornament that Shona gave Dennis:



From then on, whenever we took a trip, I picked up a Santa for our tree; or whenever something special happened, we found a Santa ornament to help us remember it.

The year we moved back to Pickens County I chose this Hallmark ornament to represent Dennis spending a lot of time on our tractor and enjoying it on our land.



As a little girl, Savannah loved those ugly Troll dolls. One of our ornaments is actually one of the set of Christmas trolls that Savannah had.



The year Dennis's girls basketball team won the State Championship I bought this Santa playing basketball. We had not won the title at the time I bought this Santa, but I was thinking positively!



The last ornament that I want to mention is very old. It belonged to my brother-in-law's father. He was at all of our Thanksgiving and Christmas get-to-gethers, and my children loved his wit and huge smile. This ornament actually belonged to him, and after his death, Emily had it in a yard sale. I picked it up because it was Pop Kirk's and it was a Santa.



Each year for many years my mom has bought everyone in the family a Hallmark ornament as part of their Christmas. I have too many to share, but I always think of my mom when I take them out of their box and find a place for them on my tree. Each time I see someone else's beautiful tree I think about changing mine, but I can't do it. There are too many memories.