As usual, trimming the tree involved broken ornaments, children teetering on stools too high for them, an impatient mama, and quite a few near mishaps. That's the fun of it, right?
Advent season was anything but slow and meditative this year due to our Owen family's impending move, and we simply didn't make time to fit in some of our Advent traditions properly. I never did Jesse tree readings each morning, and though we kept the tree bare until the eve of Christmas Eve, it was even more sad and bare without any Jesse Tree decorations, which made us yet more eager to load it with as much glitz as possible.
Mission accomplished.
"Trim it till it falls over." Yes, we have literally done that. I do not recommend it.
ReplyDeletePhil and I woke up to an almighty "CRASH!" at 4:30 a.m. two years ago. We had put up our tree just the night before. We scrambled out of bed in alarm and were greeted by the sorry sight of our beautiful tree lying on the tile floor with shattered glass and broken ornament pieces scattered in every direction. Luckily my dad's special glass bell that we always hung at the top of the tree had survived. But several other sentimental ornaments did not. My cherished glass unicorns lost horns, glass ribbons, and legs. Superglue saved a few of the ornaments. My beautiful carousel giraffe was a particular success.
But sadly, Phil's grandmother's glass baubles suffered the most. Phil's Grandma Hassey had bought them in the 1940's and we inherited them after she died earlier that year. There were a dozen of them, carefully wrapped in their original tissue paper in the original window box with ".87c" stamped on the bottom. They were hand-painted with little snowflakes and birds, and she'd kept them so carefully all those years. In something like 70 Christmases, only one glass ball had broken. That morning we lost five. As tragic as it is, we can't help but laugh at the pathetic remnant of Grandma's ornaments after their first year on the Hassey Tree.