Disadvent 18

Gave away an old Razor scooter via the local buy-nothing group.

The Ornaments, part 0

I have so much to say about ornaments that I made two false starts back in January and then gave up. (They were the third long story of the three long stories, which nobody but me remembers but is still an open to-do list item.) I still want to try to say things, but maybe broken into enough small pieces to not be a tl;dr-sized wall of text.

The Ornaments, part I

The first thing about ornaments is that there is no disadvent in ornaments. Ornaments may be created but not destroyed. Man hands on ornaments to man; they deepen like a continental shelf. (Put up as little as you can, and don't buy any ornaments yourself.)

The second first thing is that you can't imagine how many my mom had, as of last year. However many boxes you're picturing it was more than that. Years upon decades of gifts from relatives (sometimes in threes, one to my mom and one to each of my sister and me), Girl Scout craft projects, other craft projects just because my mom likes craft projects. My mom's share of all of *her* mom's ornaments, who collected Santa Claus-themed stuff and sometimes had a whole separate little tree just of Santa Claus ornaments in addition to her main tree.

In theory, I thought it was great that she was ready to downsize. In practice what she meant was that she wanted to see my sister and I divide them up, except for her favorites, perhaps the right amount for a small coffee-table tree.

I had been dodging taking more of my ornaments for years, doing things like dutifully sorting out a box of them and then leaving it behind in the garage. But it was a category of my parents' Stuff that my mom was actually ready to do something about. So... Ornaments.