Most of my Christmas decorations I received from Grandma Lewis. We have her ceramic Christmas tree with lights and little mice peeking around the tree limbs. It’s always the first Christmas thing you see when you enter my home.
We also have Grandma Lewis’ angel from the 1940’s. Pretty face printed on paper, pasted on cardboard, with a fiberglass fuzzy skirt and silvery wings. It was probably very inexpensive when she bought it, but treasured by the family as they placed it every year on top of their Christmas tree. We have it packed away as a keepsake, since it is falling apart.
When I was first married, I bought cheap Christmas balls, icicles, strings of lights that burned out and were so hard to fix you just threw them away in disgust and bought new ones every other year. I have a few Avon collectible Christmas ornaments and things the kids made in church or school. But it’s funny, I don’t seem to have very many special tree ornaments to cherish like many folks do.
I have a few ceramic decorations to set around on shelves and tables to decorate. I have pretty Christmas tablecloths and placemats, which are just a nuisance in our family when we sit down at the table to eat.
And now it is Dec. 17 and my decorations are sitting in boxes in my living room and my tree is bare, but I’ll decorate before Christmas Eve just like we did when I was a kid, and then enjoy my tree till the day after New Year’s when I will box it all up till next year.
Maybe this is a good excuse to go shopping for new ornaments and decorations at the After Christmas Sales.
Reflecting on my family life, I realize that to our family Christmas means plays and programs at church and school, practicing for weeks, learning the songs and practicing the music and the speeches.
Instead of shopping and decorating our homes, we spent our lives singing Christmas carols and performing the Christmas story and that is really what Christmas is all about anyway.