At approximately 11:57 p.m. on Tuesday night this past week, (it was certainly 11:57 p.m., because I looked directly at the clock and said in a loud, exasperated whisper, “My Gawd!  It’s 11:57 p.m.!) I awoke…

Sick as a dog.

I spent the next 48 hours in one of those 48 hour in-and-out of consciousness states.  If I spoke to anyone in town during those hours I whole-heartedly apologize (and happily take back) anything said, offered, or mumbled.  You are going to have to remind me that you spoke to me.  As a matter of fact, I am currently wondering if I am actually seated at my computer typing this week’s column, or if it is a dream.  The surrealistic scene of beautifully blowing snow outside my window competing with the joint sounds of the ‘Horton Hears a Who’ DVD and an ongoing burp and fart competition between my two boys has me guessing I may indeed be in a dream state. 

But, as most of my dreams, I’ve decided to go along with it and see where it takes me (and my current 102 degree fever).  Why not, dear reader, come along with me and see what happens.  This week’s column, I have just decided, will be on…

Ornaments.

Have you done it yet?

Have you gone to the basement?

Or perhaps it’s the attic.

Or maybe a closet you’ve annointed as special enough to hold and protect your treasure.

Do you wait until you have your tree, or do you quietly pull them out and examine them in anticipation of your tree being put in it’s own special place?

The Christmas Tree Ornaments (“CTOs” for those of you hip on Instant Messaging – er – IMing – each other.  I am not that hip).

What is it about our Ornaments that send so many of us into fits of ‘ooo and ahhh’ usually saved for Forth of July fireworks?  Perhaps more importantly, what is it about our collective memories that, each Christmas time,  even after, say, 40 YEARS (I’m admitting to nothing!) of holidays has us exclaim, “Ohhhhhh, I FORGOT about THIS one!” and “Oh, HONEY!!!  Remember…”.

Remember…

Putting aside the American Medical Association’s much touted theory that we all suffer from holiday-induced-early-onset-dementia (and, hence, should all talk to our doctors about taking HoliVox, which focuses on re-balancing our post-holiday chemical imbalances thus righting our tendencies toward forgetting our Christmas Tree Ornaments year after year, (but has side effects which may include bloating, hives, and a tendency for your spleen to explode), I think that, together, we might agree on a fairly straight forward answer to that question…

What is it about our Christmas Tree Ornaments?

Because I am stuck in a sickness induced dream state and cannot dial the phone to do research, I will start with my own memories (hoping to ignite yours and your family’s of course, because that’s my job).

When I was little – really little – at my house there were jobs at Christmas time and they seemed to be divided along traditional lines.  My mom was in charge of food.  She owned the cookie cutter and sugar cookie duty, the taping up of the cardboard pictures of Christmas characters (and the placement of the scary, plastic Santa with the unstable head (see “On Holiday Decorations [1]” from this time last year), and she owned the meal prep, including the one where she decided to have a “non-traditional” Christmas meal of Lasagna and she made a lot and froze a lot and accidentally served a lot that was frozen (half way)…I’ll save ‘Memorable Holiday Meals’ for another column.

My father, on the other hand, had tree duty.  And, like most men (even today), he made a big fat hairy deal about his ONE job, while my Mom’s finger nails were full of sugar cookie goop and she still had to do laundry, wash the floors, bathe us, and help NASA monitor the Apollo 13 mission (which seemed as if it would go off without a hitch…who knew.).  Anyway, Dad made a really BIG deal about obtaining the tree. When we went to buy a tree, the job was to choose the very best one – nice and big and FAT (I still love a fat tree) and then get it onto the old Dodge Dart and lug it into the house and set it up when we got home, and then he’d declare victory and demand shock and awe from us all, (Mom had to step away from Command and Control in order to clap.)  And then one year, he got the nutty idea to actually CUT ONE DOWN!  Man, once he was on that track, there was no going back.

What I’m sure started as a fantasized Hallmark moment of familial Christmas Tree acquisition perfection quickly turned into a scene out of Where the Wild Things Are, where the Wild Thing (Dad) roared his terrible roar and gnashed his terrible teeth and rolled his terrible eyes – all egged on by the high pitched whaling of two small, semi-frozen, whiny whimpettes. (That would be me and my sister.)  But my Dad never seemed to remember these episodes from one year to the next.  He wanted to cut down a tree every single year.  His memory was obviously shot.  If only they had HoliVox back then.

Well, after all the congratulating of Dad was over, the fake silver garland was draped onto the tree. [Side note:  I wasn’t allowed to participate in garland hanging because once I tried to surprise my parents by doing it all by myself, but when my Dad walked in and said, LOUDLY, “What are you doing?!” I was on one side of the tree with one end of garland in each hand and I jumped and tripped and fell backwards and the tree fell on me and my Mom ran in and yelled something about my four-year-old-self being IMPALED. (I didn’t’ know what that meant back then, otherwise I might have panicked more than I did.) But anyway, I wasn’t allowed to do the garland from that point on.  Garland still freaks me out.  End of side note.]

Well, after all that, we got to do the ornaments.

You know, no matter how much to do Dad tried to make getting the tree, the ornaments were the best.  I loved that part.  We had these little icicles – they were just plastic with hooks molded right on them.  I loved to put those on.  My mother and father were married in Ankara, Turkey (my Dad had been stationed there with the Army) and they had gotten these little elves that hung on the tree.  They were about six inches long and you could pose them any way you wanted and they had little loops sewn into their elf caps.  They were freaky.  But they came out every year and every year. My sister and I spent hours re-positioning them so they looked ‘comfortable’ on the tree (because it wouldn’t be fair of us to leave one hanging, like, upside down – all the elf blood rushing to his head – now would it?).  We had all the glass ornaments that we weren’t allowed to hang ourselves (boring) and then we had all the homemade ones – some saved year to year – some made every single year.  Popcorn chains, salty homemade dough that we formed into Christmas shapes and painted with watercolors and clear shiny stuff and hung on our tree, and – my favorite – red and green construction paper chains.  I could work on those darned chains for hours (much to the happiness of my DVD player-less mother).  I once made one that went from the living room to my bedroom and back again…it was HUGE (though our little ranch house was not, so my memory may be bigger than reality. Another plug for HoliVox I guess.)

In a few days, I will be getting out my own Christmas Tree Ornaments (after my husband does the tree-is-up-victory-dance) and I will carefully move aside the ribbons that sit on top of the first layer in our box and I will see a Bermuda shorts-clad surfing Santa Claus that we got when we lived in Australia.  There will be the LL Bean Snowshoes (ornament size) that my Aunt P. sent me when I was in Australia (special because they brought tears to my eyes, as I longed for cold and snow on a Christmas day that was 100 degrees plus in Melbourne and I was homesick). There will be three pairs of first baby shoes, laces tied together, and the kids will want to hold each of theirs and Mac will remember Sam’s and they both will remember helping choose Gabe’s first pair from the store for him.  I will see Mac’s Binky (pacifier) with a tattered red ribbon tying it to a photo of her with it, so we can hang it on the tree.  And I will see three beautiful white ceramic ornaments with photos on them – the kind you can get at a cart at the mall (the same cart that will put your personal photos on t-shirts does ornaments this time of year.)  My ornaments don’t have photos of my kids on them.  They have photos of my kid’s favorite baby cuddly things on them.  One has Mackenzie’s stuffed horse, Cinnamon.  One is of Sam’s Pooh-Bear.  And the other is of Gabe’s soft little blanket named Turtle.  None of the kids carries his or her cuddly around with them on a regular basis any more, but we see them and remember them when we break open our Christmas Tree Ornaments (and hopefully we always will).

There are so many more, and I’m sure if I spent time I could remember and I could tell you about them.  But I don’t want to.  I want to save the ‘oooh and ahhh’ moments for when I open up my own box in a few days’ time.  See, our Christmas Tree Ornaments are about guiltlessly hoarding memories – saving them up – so we get to have a great big smiling memory smorgasbord for an entire morning, afternoon, or evening during a really cool time of year.

I can regale you many more stories and memories surrounding my Christmas Tree Ornaments than I can tell you about the toys and other presents I’ve given or received over the years, and I’ll bet you can do the same.

Give me my memories and I think I can make for a pretty darned good Christmas time.  When my memory fails, I might consider HoliVox, but do me a favor first, okay?  Break out my Christmas ornaments and see if you can spark a memory or two first.  I’ll be sure to do the same for you.

Thanks for readin’.

Ho ho.

Lisa