The Christmas Tree

Well, my tree is up, and it's beautiful.  Gone are the days of our early marriage where the laughable theme was "Santa threw up" and the tree was bombarded with cast off broken ornaments from family and friends.  I look now and see my beautiful swarovski ornaments glistening in the lights, one for every year we've been married, the wax gingerbread men from my childhood that smell like gingerbread, marked with tiny teeth marks of both my brother and I and all of my children, all having decided at one point to see if they tasted as good as they smelled.  There's real gingerbread ornaments from 3 years ago when I made a horrid batch so we, as a family, decorated them and hung them on the tree.  (Yes, you can go so wrong with baking that it never goes bad.)  There's hideous angels from Chris' Nonna (rest her soul) that scream Italian Catholic, there's an awful wicker angel from my grandmother.  The baby's first Christmas ornaments from my 3 children,  3 brass ornaments from when I was a child and my mother had a "brass party" and made stuffed mushroom caps that I was not allowed to eat until the company arrived.  The felt mice I made with the children for all our friends last year that I remembered how to make from helping my friend Janine's mom make them for Christmas Chaos many, many years ago.  The hand beaded, lopsided, jiffy markered beauties from my children's preschool days, the glass ball filled with glitter and marked "Tabitha" for my first marital pet.  Candy Canes older than me, and new ones the children can eat, the Snowbells I sold in grade 3 door to door, and the beautiful newer ones that my mom buys me a few of every year.  As I sit staring at the beauty of so many years come together, I was struck with the realization of how many of these come from our combined families past, and how these are no longer my memories.  They belong to my children, who will one day hang some of these same ornaments, lifting the littlest one to reach the very top to put the star on, singing along to A Very Twisted Christmas, or more likely by then, crunking along to a very Bieber Christmas or something.  I still use the stocking my Grandmother made me, black with my name in felt on it.  Perhaps this is the year to make my own children's stockings anew, something they can use for a lifetime.  Religious or not, Christmas is such a magical time in our home because it brings so many elements- family, history, memories- together in a swirling, sparkling display.  It's such a blissed out, peaceful feeling of living for so much more than yourself, of building memories for these little people that you would kill for, and lovely reminiscings to share on an old porch with my husband when we're very, very old.  A sappy post, I know, but it had to be done.  It's all about the love.  And the chocolate.