Christmas Ornament Stories: My Parents’ Creativity

Every ornament tells a story.  That’s the concept of my Christmas tree.  Over the next few weeks, I am going to introduce you to some of my favorites and tell you the story behind them.

When I was growing up, my parents bought my sisters and me an ornament every year.  They were always special.  Sometimes they had our name on it. Sometimes they found it in a gift shop on a family vacation.  Sometimes they represented one of our hobbies.  Mom and Dad gave them to us the evening we decorated the Christmas tree.  It was always one of my favorite nights of the year.

My mom made this ornament for Christmas 1986 (that’s helpfully stitched into the back).  I love the simplicity and the slight sheen of the floss she used.  And I love that she made it, because she made a lot of things in the first years of my life.  In most of the pictures of me as a young child I am wearing a very cute dress my mom made me.  Once we were school-aged, she turned her sewing attention to costumes.  Betsy Ross, a Seminole Native American, and a medieval royal were some of the costumes she created for me.  She passed on her resourcefulness and some of her crafting and sewing abilities to me.

This is the ornament they gave me when I was in first grade.  That year, we were studying the middle ages at Christmas time, so this is the closest my mom could come to a medieval ornament.  A week or so before Christmas we had a reenactment of a medieval feast with a few other families.  We all had costumes.  The dining room was arranged to look like the great hall of a European castle.  Each family created a banner to represent the tapestries found in castles (I think my parents still have the one we made).  We were the entertainment between courses.  One of my friends juggled.  Another told jokes.  I recited the poem “Four and twenty blackbirds baked into a pie.”

The best part was the dessert.  It was a castle cake!  The moms planned how to bake cake in coffee cans and loaf pans and get it to stay together like a castle (in the days long before Pinterest).  I think she stayed up late and got up early to put it together, because I was totally surprised.  Standing guard at the drawbridge was this ornament (and my sister’s similar one).  I had noticed that morning that it was missing from the tree.  I was delighted and surprised that it was part of this magnificent cake.  So every year when I put this ornament on the tree, I am reminded of that cake and the many, many hours my mom invested in giving me an excellent education.