Does your family have a box of Christmas ornaments that has been around longer than you have?
Maybe it was your grandmother’s, then your mother’s, and now it sits on a shelf in your closet. You might have wondered if it’s time to let some of it go.
At our house, that box comes out every single year.
The Saturday after Thanksgiving is decorating day for us. The leftovers are in the fridge, and the coffee is on. The family is still in town, and nobody is in a hurry to leave.
My grandson carries the ornament boxes down from the top of the hall closet. I don’t climb for them anymore (my knee made that decision for me). The granddaughters sit on the living room rug and wait for me to open the first box.
My mother did the same thing on the same weekend when I was a girl. Her mother’s ornaments came out first, before anything else touched the tree.
So when I lift the lid, I know what will be on top. It’s my grandmother’s little glass bird, wrapped in white tissue. I always pack it last in January so it can come out first.
Some of the ornaments on our tree are close to a hundred years old. Some were made with glue and glitter by my own children in Sunday school.
Every one of them gets hung.
I know there’s a lot of talk these days about letting go of old things. But these heirloom Christmas ornaments are not clutter to me. They come out every year, and we use them.
So I’ll share whose ornaments are on our tree, the five things I do to keep them in one piece, and how we make sure the stories get passed down too.