It’s the holidays! Here’s my tree!

The first Christmas after we got married, my mother gave me a bunch of her ornaments. My husband’s parents give him (and now me) one ornament per year, and many of those are there, too. So most of our ornaments have been with us a long time. For example:

When I was six or seven, I noticed that my brother and sister had special favorite ornaments that were “theirs” and I didn’t. So I got to choose “my” ornament, and I selected those two tiny mushrooms at some gift store that was in Dinkydale at the time. The big mushroom is the sole Christmas ornament that my husband and I had in Paris in 2010; we bought it at some Scandinavian gift store in the 4th and hung it on our apartment door. It was a bright spot during a low, bleak period of Parisian winter (before we escaped to Barcelona for Christmas to rediscover what sunshine was like). Angelbear was a toy of mine when I was eight or nine, a friend of Bearbear (who hangs toward the bottom of the tree, visible above). That angel was made for us, probably fifteen years ago, by a good friend who’d taken to making wire sculptures out of his broken bass guitar strings. And the tree itself is a balsam pine from the forest around the cabin, cut for us by my husband’s parents. So we are very fortunate, with all these gifts.

Hope whatever holiday you all are enjoying is full of happy little stories, old and new.