We traveled, unplannedly, this week, to spend time with family members we rarely see, to join together to send Jessie off on her long-planned journey beyond the walls of this world. That is a topic for another post, or several. But, the timing being what it was, there were Christmas trees embedded in the scenery of the event (and not bad, that, seeing everywhere a reminder of the eternal evergreen-ness of life, and of the coming of the One who both made and redeemed our life).
The morning after the funeral, several of us sat in the living room of my parents' house with my mother, and we told my brother's wife and my daughters little bits of our life history, represented by the ornaments on the tree in the corner. The oldest decorations are little plastic bells that Mama has been putting on her tree "as long as I can remember," which is sixty-some years. Then there are the small blue bulbs and the icicles from Mama and Daddy's first Charlie Brown Christmas tree, a month after they were married. There are handcrafted items clearly made by people of varying age and skill, some folks long gone, others just long grown up.
I know my parents' tree is not unique, that many of us decorate our trees in this manner, with those "special" ornaments that we hang in the back, out of sight, because we can't bear to exclude the memories they carry. Our Christmas trees are a chronicle of each holiday season and all the times between, from one year to the next, from childhood to age and beyond.
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