Christmas Tree Ornaments as family history

One of the most fun things about Christmas at our house is trimming the tree. We have been collecting ornaments for a long time.

Some are old. Some of the ornaments go back in our families. The kind of ornament you see in the top left, almond-shaped with a recessed center, was the kind we both remember most from growing up in both our families, mine on a farm in Idaho, Sandy's in a suburb in LA. A lot of the small round ornaments here on the top of the tree go back to our childhoods, and Sandy figures that sparkly one with the pink recessed center may be getting on towards eighty-some years in her family.

This one comes from Sandy's family before she was born.














This plastic snowman ornament goes back to the 1950s in Sandy's family. They bought one for her and one for her brother, Mike. The price tag, still on the bottom, still says $.10, so you know this is either ancient or from mid-January from Garden Ridge.















Some are reasonably contemporary. I bought this one of an @ sign at a Christmas market in Sweden back when email was new and we were sort of obsessed with the wonders of the infant internet. We were enthusiastically participating at the time in a number of new communities of interest we had found on email listservs back in the early 1990s.


Sandy has been interested in most things Scandinavian for a long time. When she was in grad school at Stanford, coming back home to Los Angeles for holidays, she would sometimes stop at a "Danish" village for tourists called Solvang. This little nisse (Danish Christmas elf) dates back to one of those stops. Just to his left is an origami box ornament that Sandy made. For some reason, holidays frequently summon prodigious sieges of handicraft by Sandy, so one Christmas she made dozens of these.

Ornaments do come in from all sorts of places, which adds to the fun. The round ornament on the left, with the celtic knotwork, is a site token from a Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) event called Clancy Day in Ontario, Canada, back when we lived in Michigan and went up to SCA events in Canada a lot. (The token showed that you had paid your entrance, or site, fee, so people started making them more and more interesting, so several ended up on the tree and dozens live in a box somewhere.) The heart on the right came from the Christmas bazaar in Århus, Denmark last year. Danes love to decorate Christmas scenes and trees with red hearts, and we got into the spirit of it.

Sandy liked the heart motif long before we lived in Denmark. Here is an embroidered felt heart she made, sort of in the style of Hungarian folk art (which she also likes a lot), when when she was in college in the early 1970s.