A Little of This and That Ornament Blogging

I really intended to organize my ornament blogging thematically this year!
But after all that's been going on at work and on the home front, it just hasn't worked out like I planned. Something about the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley comes to mind...! Anyway here are today's offerings, a bit of this and that, each with its own story to tell....

This shot showcases another of Fernymoss' new finds ... the gold fish with blue stripes, who's swimming through a veritable sea of assorted companion ornaments, including my precious Eiffel Tower (I got that one about three years ago), various bauble type ornaments and one of the strawberries from our collection of fruit ornaments. In fact, this strawberry (and the others in the set) was among the ornaments we bought the year we got our first tree, way back in 1998 (the year we moved here to Casa IVG). Over the ensuing years, we've built up quite a collection of fruit/veggie ornaments, and are always on the lookout for new additions. So far we have strawberries, oranges, apples, grapes, and pears, but the artichoke and carrot ornaments still elude my efforts. You can also spot a few of our glass icicle ornaments, a gift from Fernymoss' mom from a couple of years back. She spotted them on a day trip one summer (of all times!) and they just begged her to get them for us, so here they are now; we think they're quite lovely and are great at catching the color from the surrounding lights....

Here's our frosty pickle, another of the ornaments I got in the Denver airport several years back during that long delay I mentioned in a previous post. Someone had told me it was traditional to have a pickle ornament on the tree ... there was some folklore associated with this, but it has long since escaped my memory. Something about an old poor woman or some such lore, I think? If anyone knows the precise tale, let me know! To the left you can get a backside glimpse of my Pink Flamingo, an absolute necessity for any diehard John Waters fan such as myself! It took me a few years to find it, but now it's got a front and center spot on the tree every year ... You can also spy one of our (many) decorated glass egg ornaments we went gaga over a few years back. They reminded us of the famous Fabergé eggs so popular during the reign of the Czars in imperial Russia ... these hardly rival their famous heritage, but they are quite pretty and add a lot of sparkle to the tree. We gave a lot of these as gifts the year we found them, and it's always fun to see somone else's tree sporting something that came from us originally....

Finally, these "teardrop" reflective center ornaments are very old fashioned, I think, and I can remember when I was a kid my parents had a bunch of these type of ornaments that they considered out of fashion, so they rarely got put on the tree unless I insisted I be allowed to hang one or two. We've found that they're definitely back in style, and we have several types and colors of them all around the tree, because we love the way they flash from the reflection of nearby lights, and in fact, they positively glow! Both Fernymoss and I have a fondness for retro looking ornaments in general, I guess because they remind us of our childhood memories of how beautiful and magical the family Christmas Tree seemed in our young eyes. So that's what we try to recreate in our trees every year ... a bit of magic, a lot of flash and sparkle to cheer us up in the dark of winter. Some of our ornamental traditions date back to the Pagan Yule (such as placing edible items or simulacra thereof on the tree), while others are purely reminders of childhood. It's all one big eclectic mix of course, but that's a perfect reflection of who we both are ... amalgams of all sorts of traditions and tastes and interests that all compete for attention at this time of year while they go on display on the tree for a few short weeks. It's always a bittersweet process to have to pack them all up and put them away till the following year ... but we enjoy it while we can and usually stretch out the season a while beyond New Year's just so we can continue to bask in the colorful glow just a little while longer....

Tomorrow we'll focus on the top of the tree, and you may be surprised to see some of what's lurking up there! So stop back and see what you think....