MY ORNAMENTS

A Hallmark commercial came on while I was decorating the Christmas tree. It showed two little girls looking at their ornaments and remembering stories behind them. I thought at the time that it would be nice if my ornaments had a little story behind them, and then as I put them on the tree, I realized, THEY DO!

My most treasured ornament is the 'Humdinger'. It came from my Grandma Harman. Every year my Grandma would hang it at the top of her tree and when we went to visit she would lift me up to ring it, each time she would say " It's a HUMMMMM DINGER". Mom had it on her tree for years after and carried on the tradition of lifting my kids up to ring it, but they didn't do the HUMMMM anything like Grandma used to. Quite a few years back Mom passed it on to me and now each year my own grandkids get a chance to ring it. I don't know if they even know what it is called. I've told them, but they don't seem as excited about it as I remember being when I got to ring it.

Mom painted soldiers and little dolls out of clothes pins...with every detail, check out the buttons on the shoes! Every year Mom paints us some kind of place marker for the Christmas dinner table. Usually it is a tree ornament, so I have quite a collection of 'John and Vicki' ornaments. The oldest ornaments on my tree are from John's mom Cleo, they were on her tree when she was growing up. I'm not quite sure what they are supposed to be except a decoration. (bottom row, center)

I have a plastic white reindeer and a red elf. Kinda funny looking, but we always had them on the tree when I was little. One year, before the days when Mom had a real tree flocker, my Dad sprayed white 'snow' all over the tree when we were done decorating to give it the 'just snowed' look. My littlest sister, Cyndi, got so upset because he got snow on the faces of the elves and ran for a cloth to wash it off them. There is a cute little horse that my aunt made, kinda clever how you insert a candy cane in it.

I have an ornament from Dennis and Abby of the US Capitol from when they lived in Baltimore and one from my friends Ron and Ann to remember when they took me to visit the White House (we even got to see President Bush!) I have two tiny bells that are made into snowmen with Emily and Joshua's names on them. And then there is the GREEN M&M. One of the ornaments depicts the nativity scene, another a snowball. I really like snowmen, so I have plenty of snowmen on the tree.

I have a tiny motorcycle to mark that Little John loved them, a skier turned into a snowball with skis that really rolls around because Dennis was into skiing, and a little ballerina mouse because Jessi was my ballerina. There is a sand dollar that I found on the beach, my sister-in-law Terri and I would walk the beach while the guys were fishing on the jetty and one time we found buckets of sand dollars. Once we got them all home, we had no idea what to do with them, so we painted some of them to look like poinsettias. There are other ornaments I made...a hazelnut angel, a walnut manger for baby Jesus, a noodle angle and a mouse made from a thistle, a wreath I wove from wheat and a reindeer from clothes pins. The first year Johnjohn was born, I started making hand prints from dough. I made them every year from all three kids and painted the year on them. I stopped doing them when my whole tree was covered with hand prints and realized it didn't look so good after all. Eventually most of them have broken, some of them molded in storage and have been tossed out, but I still have the first year's hand print from each kid. The first year I was married, I made ornaments from egg shells that I had blown the eggs out of. We had a lot of scrambled eggs that first year. I painted them all up and was pretty proud of them. The last few years, they have remained in the egg carton. Somehow, their time has past, kinda like the tree full of hand prints and mice made from thistles.