On Dec. 22, I finally put up our tree and finished making our Christmas card! lol I'm a little late this year. :) I guess I was having sort of a hard time getting into the spirit of things. Half of me always looks so forward to Christmas and the other half doesn't because it makes me a little sad too. I really didn't feel like going through all the effort of hanging up lights on the house and putting up the tree and all that stuff. I've been so busy lately with very little downtime, and it just seemed like one more thing to do, not to mention having to take it all down again later. But then I didn't like the fact that I didn't care about decorating for Christmas. It's something I've always done, even when I just lived on my own, because it makes me happy. So last night I decided I cared, dammit :), and I drug everything out and finished at about 1:00 in the morning. So what if it will only be up for like a week. Christmas comes once a year, and I knew I'd regret it if I did nothing. And I'm glad now that I did it.
One thing that motivated me a little was the fact that when my dad gave me tons and TONS of stuff he wanted purged out of his house, one of those boxes was all our old Christmas decorations and ornaments. Now, I'm normally the kinda girl who wants a tree with two or three colors max, with everything coordinating and tidy, and pretty ribbons, blah blah blah, but this year, that sounded kinda boring suddenly. So I got out the box of my childhood ornaments and put them all on instead. As I went through that box and reminisced about the memory associated with each ornament, I relived all those sweet Christmases as a little girl home with my mom. I remembered making some of them at school and proudly bringing them home for her. I remembered the ones she bought for me...for the longest time, she would buy me one ornament every year that usually said the year on it, and it was something she'd picked out just for me and often said something about how a daughter makes Christmas special. There were the stuffed reindeer that she'd display, one of which my puppy promptly found and destroyed. :) There was the pink angel, and the Sugarplum fairy she bought for me when I begged for it after we went to see The Nutcracker, and the multitude of kitty cat ornaments (I had a one-track mind as a child). The only things I did differently from her were I used beaded garland instead of tinsel garland and white lights instead of colored. Maybe next year I'll integrate the old with the new and mix my childhood traditions with new ones. But for this year, our tree is just right.
It was a mixture of sweetness and sadness as I held up each ornament and then found its place on the tree, like most things in life. When it was all done, it was wonderful to stand back and look at "my mom's tree" put together again for the first time in several years. And I'm definitely glad I did it. Here's the picture...nothing fancy but full of warm, sweet memories.
One thing that motivated me a little was the fact that when my dad gave me tons and TONS of stuff he wanted purged out of his house, one of those boxes was all our old Christmas decorations and ornaments. Now, I'm normally the kinda girl who wants a tree with two or three colors max, with everything coordinating and tidy, and pretty ribbons, blah blah blah, but this year, that sounded kinda boring suddenly. So I got out the box of my childhood ornaments and put them all on instead. As I went through that box and reminisced about the memory associated with each ornament, I relived all those sweet Christmases as a little girl home with my mom. I remembered making some of them at school and proudly bringing them home for her. I remembered the ones she bought for me...for the longest time, she would buy me one ornament every year that usually said the year on it, and it was something she'd picked out just for me and often said something about how a daughter makes Christmas special. There were the stuffed reindeer that she'd display, one of which my puppy promptly found and destroyed. :) There was the pink angel, and the Sugarplum fairy she bought for me when I begged for it after we went to see The Nutcracker, and the multitude of kitty cat ornaments (I had a one-track mind as a child). The only things I did differently from her were I used beaded garland instead of tinsel garland and white lights instead of colored. Maybe next year I'll integrate the old with the new and mix my childhood traditions with new ones. But for this year, our tree is just right.
It was a mixture of sweetness and sadness as I held up each ornament and then found its place on the tree, like most things in life. When it was all done, it was wonderful to stand back and look at "my mom's tree" put together again for the first time in several years. And I'm definitely glad I did it. Here's the picture...nothing fancy but full of warm, sweet memories.
