O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree!
Color-coordinated Chrismtas trees. They're everywhere. Every apartment building, office building, and shopping mall has one. It looks perfect. It looks pristine. It looks...manufactured.
Our Christmas trees have never been that way. If it has ever been color-coordinated it was by sheer accident, and I'm fairly positive it has never looked traditionally perfect. Ours is a hodge-podge of ornaments: seeming randomness of colors, materials, and subject matter. A second glance, though, shows a deeper meaning. Each ornament is tied to childhood memories and family anecdotes. They are all hung with a careful hand, and where they are placed is extensively thought out. Our tree tells our family story.
My mother hands me small, paper-thin glass ornaments. I can tell they used to be brightly colored, but now the color is faded and cracked. She warns me to be careful with them, and reminds me they were Great MomMom Wolfe's. I always smile a little bit when I see this particular group of ornaments. It's not terribly often that she crosses my mind, but when she does I'm overwhelmed by memories of a loving, generous, and kind woman whom I loved dearly as a child.
My father hangs a series of wooden ornaments: a jack-in-the-box, a soldier, a hobby horse, etc. These have been hanging on our tree for as long as I can remember. These are from my parent's first Christmas together. That Christmas was spent in Korea, where hand-carved wooden ornaments were common. I can always see a special smile flicker between them when Dad hangs these.
Then there is a wreath/picture frame ornament. My two-year-old self is in the middle of this wreath, and Dad hangs it in the center of the tree every year. It's also always the first ornament to go on the tree. Apparantly "Baby's First Christmas" ornaments weren't popular the year I was born, so this is actually the first ornament they ever got for me. Hanging directly underneath that is a precious moments ornament that reads "our first Christmas." This started being hung on the tree the year Bug was born.
There are other occasions marked: my first day of school, my freshman year of college, Bug's first day of pre-school. The death of family members past, and the birth of new family members. All of these occasions are marked somewhere on our tree. So no, our tree is not color coordinated, but our tree is my favorite kind of Christmas tree.