Up the Sunbeam

Here it is!  There is one box I must find first--the 22-year old cardboard box with yellowing shipping tape and Grandma Laurene's lacy handwriting with our used-to-be address in Oakland on it.  This is the decoration that goes up first every year! The contents are just as they were the first time I opened this box--two pieces of heavy foam sandwiching the prize between them.  The excitement is the same in 2010 as it was in 1988! Our very own jewel tree, designed and hand-crafted just for us by Grandma Laurene and Grandpa Dale. Like others in the family who had these special customized trees, Hero Husband and I, married just 8 months when we received ours, were being acknowledged as the beginnings of a new family, a new branch on the family tree.  I loved that! I looked at every single detail!  There were so many lovely vintage pieces of costume jewelry I vividly remembered being worn by both my Grandma and my Great Grandma before her. Oh, and look her...

-- Every year since My Tony and I got married, we have bought a new Christmas ornament . Most of them commemorate some event during the year ( like 9/11 ), some family joke or shared experience that we want to remember. My favorite part of decorating (which I haven't even started yet) is putting the now large collection of ornaments on the tree. Now, my kids will tell you, this wasn't always so much fun . . . FOR THEM. I used to have this THING. You know, a THING, a hangup, an obsession. I was a teeny bit crazed about the necessity (in my mind) to put the ornaments on the tree, one by one, in chronological order. To be fair (and I KNOW you want to be fair) I started this FROM THE BEGINNING when there was only one ornament, then two, then three, and so on. However, by the time my kids were 12 and 7 and each of them had personal ornaments too and the number had grown to more than 25 ornaments, my little ritual had outgrown itself. It no longer served a good purpose. ...