MaNiC mOnDaY ~ Ornament

With the Christmas season upon us once again, Mo has chosen the word "ornament" as the theme for Manic Monday this week. Decorating a Christmas tree has always been a grand occasion in my family. It seems my parents' collection of trees has grown over the years. I remember we had one big one in the living room at first, then we added a smaller one from my grandma in the den. My parents built a house when I was in college, and bought two more trees, bringing the total to four. One for the "parlor", one for the living room, one for the 3-season porch, and our old one in the finished side of the basement. Besides those, there was always evergreen garland on the cabinets, banisters, and light fixtures, a wreath on the front door, an electric candle in every window, white lights in evergreen arrangements in the back yard, and yet more evergreen garland wrapped around the lamppost in the front yard.

Now that my brother and I have homes of our own, only one or two of those trees go up every year. And maybe there's not so many decorations out and about in the house. But it's always very obvious that it's Christmastime at my mom's house!

I bought my first tree when I had my apartment, several years ago. It's not very big, in fact I'm a little bit taller than it is. I bought a silvery skirt for it, an angel in a silver dress, and a bunch of iridescent ornaments. I also bought a few strands of iridescent beads to wrap around it. With multicolored lights, it was quite the sight to see. Then when Billy and I spent our first Christmas together, he introduced me to the idea of tinsel. We also bought several ornaments together, of various cartoon characters, and even a couple of NASCAR cars. The last thing we bought was a little train set that actually attaches to the tree. A couple of AA batteries, and it chugs around very nicely, if I do say so myself! Our tree is very much "us" now, and I love getting it set up every year. This year the Christmas spirit hit pretty early, and we had the tree up the day before Thanksgiving! I'm sure it will stay up for a while after Christmas too. For me, nothing says "holiday spirit" like brightly colored ornaments peeking out from the branches of our Christmas tree.