Christmas traditions - part 1

Growing up, every year at Christmas time, we would go to my great-aunt's house and marvel at her shining, twinkling tree consisting mainly of gold...24K, that is. She and my grandma both subscribed to the Danbury Mint, but, as I remember it (not sure how accurate this is), Bebe received more over the course of the year than Grandma did. Some they kept, and some they gave away as gifts. But, after several years of collecting, Bebe had quite a show tree. When she passed away, somehow the ornaments were split up between family members. And, Dad passed some of his on to us girls. The best part is that he and Mom decided to continue the subscription, so, for the past few years, we have continued to receive additions to our own collections.

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Just over eight and a half years ago, I decided that a fun element to our wedding would be origami cranes. So, in between looking for a job and taking care of the other wedding plans, I spent much of that summer folding squares of gold paper into 300-400 birds. When the wedding came, they were a big hit and looked great on the tables. I never anticipated keeping any of them. As the evening came to a close, our friend and seasonal neighbor, Mary, noticed that there were still some cranes scattered on several of the tables and that the hotel staff was starting to clean them up. She quickly halted them, asked for a box and collected around 100 cranes. We never knew she did this.

Fast forward just over a year. Mary and Tom and the kids arrived at my parents' house for a Labor Day picnic carrying an unmarked brown box. She handed it to me and said, "Happy Anniversary!" I was thrilled to open it up and see a box full of little gold cranes!

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Our house in Ohio was tight. After we added the second kid, there wasn't much room to get around or store things so a second Christmas tree was totally out of the question. Growing up, we always had two...one in the living room for the fancy ornaments and one in the family room for all the kids' non-fancy ornaments (some of ours were still worthy and breakable enough to hang in the living room away from the dog and out of the main foot traffic through the house). Last year, I finally added the second Christmas tree to our own traditions. We now have the room to store it off season and I found a nice one on sale right before Christmas last year.

The second tree in our house has brought together the gold ornaments from my childhood (and fond memories of Bebe and Grandma) and the gold cranes from our wedding (and memories from the day as well as fun times with Mary and family over the past 20 years). This year, I moved the tree out of the living room and into the dining room to clear a spot for the village in the living room (another post...coming soon).


I love it in that room...it almost looks like it should be there all year long. Almost. And I like that it is moved just to the side of the major household traffic. Although, I usually find a little of this every time Molly decides she needs to take a look out the front window:

I guess that's the benefit of paper ornaments!

More on our Christmas traditions to come.