What’s your favorite Christmas ornament?
When I was a kid, growing up Jewish, I adored the shiny, matching ornaments of the department store trees, twinkling with the glow of the holidays. This one was all silver! That one was all gold! I assumed this was how anyone and everyone would want to decorate their tree. These trees told the story of the holiday, they defined the season, they were simply perfect.
And then I met and married a Catholic man and suddenly I got to get a tree of my own. Oh, how I dreamed of those perfect trees! I couldn’t wait to decorate ours, as soon as I decided on a color theme and design scheme.
I went to his family’s home and to my horror, they pulled out boxes upon boxes of mismatched Christmas ornaments. All these years they could have the perfect tree — didn’t they know?!? — and all these years they chose to put up something else entirely.
But then, as they pulled each ornament out of the ratty, decades old boxes and unwrapped the tattered tissue paper, they talked about the origins of the piece, about the trip where it was purchased, or about the long lost loved one who gifted it or even made it by hand.
And I fell in love.
These became my favorite Christmas ornaments.
It’s been over twenty years and over twenty trees since, and I am proud to say that each year our Christmas ornament collection gets more eclectic, writing the history of our lives. There are the first baby ornaments, the preschool craft ornaments, the vacation ornaments we painstaking selected together. And there are also the ornaments that were gifted in the early days of our marriage, dispensed in corporate gift bags, and purchased on major markdown on Dec 26 but which we keep year after year and laugh about how far we’ve come since that first sad Charlie Brown three-ornament tree of our first year of marriage. My favorite one has a random photo of us, both unshowered, in t-shirts, young as babies; it was just lying around when we were gifted the ornament, and in went the photo and it’s never come out.
These Christmas ornaments, the ones we love and the ones that have been demoted to filler, are perfectly imperfect markers on the roadmaps of our lives. They tell our stories. They remind me, every year, that perfection is never as interesting as authenticity. Because it is in our imperfections, in the whole of our motley stories, that we are our best and truest selves.
It’s beginning to look a lot like (mismatched) Christmas, and I’d not have it any other way.
P.S. Want to read about my favorite Christmas cookie?
