The Family Christmas Tree

We put our Christmas tree up this week. It's a real tree that we cut down at a tree farm, so it smells wonderfully piney and fragrant. The tree itself is huge and bushy, so it's able to hold the multitude of decorations our family has collected over the years (some of the ornaments are older than my sister and I!).

For me, the best decorated Christmas trees are the ones that include ornaments that have memories attached to them. I prefer to trim a tree with old, worn ornaments that have a special history than to decorate a tree with a bunch of shiny new ornaments (not that I dislike new decorations; we don't all necessarily have those family heirlooms, but you can certainly start somewhere!).For example, my stepfather has decorations that were handmade by an aunt, while some of our ornaments were made by my sister and I when we were in kindergarten or brownies. Some of them were handmade in recent years, or were given to us as gifts by someone special (like teachers and aunts). As we take each decoration out of the box one by one, we each have different memories to share; there's definitely something more special about that than hanging new ornaments on the tree.

Little handmade paper decorations adorn the tree, or margarine lids turned into picture-frame ornaments. Of course, I can't forget about those special baby ornaments, or the little knit red stockings my grandmother made to hang on mine and my sister's incubators when we stayed in the hospital as premature babies around Christmas. We have shiny balls, wooden ornaments, and even souvenirs brought home from places like the British Virgin Islands or Portugal, but they are always ones that we remember year after year and don't get thrown out until they are broken and irreparable. Although our Christmas tree may look a little unconventional, and certainly not the modern, colour-coordinated look some people try to attain, to us our tree is the best one around!