Merry Christmas

A lifetime of memories from a Christmas ball that hung on my great-grandparents tree in the 1890s, to ones from my grandparents 50th anniversary Christmas. Ornaments from our first Christmas together, from my wife’s childhood and ones made by our children. Ornaments given to us by friends long gone and from Christmas shops in Germany, France, England and throughout the U.S.  

An ornament from each summer vacation on Cape Cod, especially from a shop called Father Christmas where the owners became our friends and Jim was taken from us way too soon.

There are too many ornaments now to fit on any tree I could carry, but each year we go through them all remembering the trips, the vacations, our friends and each Christmas past. And each Christmas we try to explain to grandchildren what some of these ornaments mean to us, but for now they are focused on finding the pickle and winning a prize.

And that train under the tree; that’s a 1920 set of Lionel that was my fathers, a train sold and then recovered for me by my wife, another special memory.

We may call it a Christmas tree, but it’s really a memory tree, a colorful, wonderful diary of our lives …

                  that you have to take apart and figure out where each of those ornaments belong and most of all … make sure you didn’t leave one on the tree 🙄

Merry Christmas