Christmas Ornament Tradition

December 6, 2010 By
One of the many won­der­ful things about this time of year is all the dif­fer­ent tra­di­tions car­ried out.  My par­ents started an orna­ment tra­di­tion when I was born and I am so thank­ful they did.  The tra­di­tion is simple–they sim­ply got an orna­ment for me each year.  Once I was old enough, I got to pick out my own ornaments.  
Some orna­ments are just some­thing they thought was cute or some­thing I liked at the time (like my Care Bear orna­ment from 1986); some are from spe­cial places (like my Fig­ment orna­ment from our 1991 Dis­ney World trip and my sham­rock from a band trip to Ire­land in 2000); and some have spe­cial mean­ing for that year (like the clar­inet, drum, and Nebraska orna­ment from my first year of col­lege). For any orna­ment with­out the year on it, my mom wrote the year on the bottom.  
The tra­di­tion con­tin­ued up until I got mar­ried. For that last year, some type of engage­ment orna­ment seemed per­fect.  But, at the time, we couldn’t find any­thing.  So, my mom sur­prised me by mak­ing one.  Using the pic­ture of the pro­posal (my hus­band pro­posed to me in one of my grad­u­ate school classes, so there are pic­tures), she did her best to recre­ate the scene: 

It’s one of my very favorites! This year, Big Brother noticed it and said, “look, it’s Mommy & Daddy”.  
The first Christ­mas we were mar­ried, my par­ents gave me all my orna­ments (and we received my husband’s orna­ments as his grandma started the same tra­di­tion in their fam­ily when my hus­band was about 10 or so).  We con­tin­ued the tra­di­tion and each year (even before kids) we got an orna­ment for us.  Now, we’ve started our lit­tle guys’ orna­ment col­lec­tions as well.  

It’s such a sim­ple tra­di­tion to carry out and one that is so sen­ti­men­tal.  Each year, I love get­ting out all these spe­cial ornaments–bringing back so many won­der­ful mem­o­ries of years past.  


Do you have any orna­ment tra­di­tions or ones with extra spe­cial meaning?

6 Comments

Comments

  1. 1
    JDaniel4's Mom says:
    December 7, 2010 at 7:30 am

    We do this at my house too. My two year old loved pick­ing out his orna­ment this year.

    Reply
  2. 2
    Megan @ PolishTheStars.com says:
    December 8, 2010 at 6:58 pm

    What a fun tra­di­tion! I love how the orna­ments all tell a story. Thanks for sharing!

    Reply
  3. 3
    Busy as a Bee in Paris says:
    December 9, 2010 at 9:48 pm

    won­der­ful tra­di­tion! i’ve heard of oth­ers doing this and maybe next year i’ll start this with my own chil­dren! thanks for link­ing up! could you grab a but­ton (the code was bro­ken, but it’s fixed now) thanks again!

    Reply
  4. 4
    Jolanthe says:
    December 10, 2010 at 7:06 pm

    awww…that’s so sweet that your mom made you one!

    Reply
  5. 5
    Jillian says:
    December 13, 2010 at 7:00 pm

    I am so glad to see other peo­ple doing this too! I started this with my boys a cou­ple of years ago when they were 7 and 4 I believe, so not since birth but I think its a good start. I don’t let them pick their orna­ments, what I do is pick an orna­ment that is sig­nif­i­cant to some­thing they accom­plished, or did, or are into from the year. Love it.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. 15 Fun Family Holiday Christmas Traditions! says:
    December 17, 2012 at 10:50 am

    […] Hol­i­day ornaments—Sara from Mom Endeav­ors talks about the pop­u­lar tra­di­tion pur­chas­ing or mak­ing each child a spe­cial orna­ment every year.  You can even do this for your­self and your spouse. […]

    Reply

Speak Your Mind

*

Copyright info:

I’d love for you to share about ideas from Mom Endeav­ors (and I espe­cially love it when you take the time to let me know you’ve fea­tured me!!)! If you wish to share any posts or pho­tographs from this site on your blog or web­site, you may use one pic­ture with a link to the orig­i­nal post. Please do not repost/duplicate the whole post/tutorial or dis­trib­ute printed con­tent with­out writ­ten per­mis­sion from the orig­i­nal author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

“Tweet tweet”

  • The Twitter API returned an error while processing your request. Please try again.