This is a beautiful, ornately decorated and lit basket that I purchased from a colleague several years ago. I bought it as a gift to my parents for Christmas. And, in my most humble opinion, it is one of the coolest Christmas gifts I’ve ever purchased!
Karen and I are spending this Christmas with my end of the family, based not quite as far North as Karen’s side, but still far enough to be substantially colder. My parents are notorious for being a bit elaborate with the Christmas light show, but they manage to avoid being gaudy or tacky. Christmas decorations are a curious thing. Its no surprise, I don’t think, that we illuminate our nights with festive lighting at the time of year when daylight is shortest, and days of dreary weather can depress the most optimistic among us. For those of us who celebrate Christmas, this is a most celebratory of occasions, marking the moment when history altered forever, both in the realms of the finite and the Infinite. We celebrate, in part, by shining lights into the darkness, a literal symbol of the most poetic description of He whose birth we observe. Even the most environmentally conscious among us become quickly tolerant of electric candles in our windows and Christmas trees lit from dusk to bedtime.
I love our Christmas tree, what Karen refers to as a “memory tree.” Our ornaments are a collection from our past, both our lives before we met and our subsequent adventures together. I have a Santa from my freshman year in college, and a paper gingerbread man from my first real job after college. We have an ornament from the beach where we spent our honeymoon, and an ornament from our trip to the International Spy Museum.
The reason I love this theme of decoration for our Christmas tree is because it allows me to end our year by re-visiting some of the best moments of our lives, talk about the moments that happened before we met, be thankful for the adventures that we’ve had, and anticipate the adventures that are yet to come.
How do you decorate your tree? Why?
I wish you all a most blessed and peaceful of Holidays.