Each year I carefully unpack my Christmas ornaments and distant memories stir as I free little treasures from tissue paper wrappings. This year, among the crumpled paper, bits of tinsel and glitter, I found three ornaments from my childhood.
Not just any time of my childhood but the happiest time. A time when my family consisted of just me, my mom and two sisters. We lived in a tiny single wide trailer perched precariously on the side of a hill in Kentucky. It wasn't much but it was the best my mom could provide. Back in the 60's being a single woman living alone with her three kids was not easy but she made do.
Christmas was my mom's favorite time of the year. She would get a real tree and drag it into our tiny trailer filling it with wonderful evergreen scent. Christmas had arrived! Invariably the tree would be too tall or wide. This situation was the perfect opportunity for me to add new "ugly words" to my "list of words not allowed to say" courtesy of my mother's frustration with trimming the tree to fit in the trailer. She had quite the colorful vocabulary back then.
Then the decorating would begin! We draped the branches with huge colorful lights large enough to land airplanes. Ropes of fluffy silver garland wrapped the tree and ornaments made of colorful glass decorated with glitter and paint adorned the branch tips. I thought those ornaments were the most beautiful exotic things ever!
I loved sitting by the tree engulfed in the fresh evergreen scent, basking in the glow of the colorful lights and staring at the beautiful jewel like ornaments. The way the light bounced and reflected from them mesmerized me. The bright cheerful colors made me forget, just for a time, the daily struggles our little family faced. I coveted those round glass globes. They were magic.
Time marched on and things inevitably changed. My mom married a soldier and we moved to North Carolina far from our little trailer on the hill. Later my parents bought a "real" house and our real Christmas tree was replaced by a hard stiff plastic tree that didn't smell like anything natural. The lights became tiny twinkle lights and the glass ornaments replaced by plastic.
Somehow, along the way, I managed to save three of those special jewels from my childhood. These days their colors aren't as bright, painted designs are scratched and faded, the glitter fallen away. But the sweet warm memories of a Christmas long past still glow bright in the reflections of my childhood treasures.
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