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The Ornaments, part II
Dec. 20th, 2025 10:26 amLast year's divvying up of the family ornaments took an unexpected turn when the entire tree fell down, raising the temperature three steps and removing eight plants. No, sorry, that's Deimos Down. My mom has always loved big Christmas trees and if this was maybe going to be the last time she was hosting the whole family she wanted a really big tree, so it was like eight feet tall and unbelievably packed with what was still only a mere fraction of the ornament hoard. Most of which were (naturally) on the front facing the room and not on the back facing the wall. I think the stand just couldn't handle it. My sister and I were sitting across the room and had just enough time to make horrified faces at each other as it suddenly swayed forward and fell. Happy Christmas Eve!
We cleaned up the water and broken glass and took all the ornaments off and stood it up again and wired it to the wall and redecorated with only non-breakable ornaments, Christmas was saved, yay. (I thought maybe we should get rid of it before it could strike again but this was unpopular.)
And at the same time, we conducted a confusing and occasionally fraught process of "ornament shopping" in which first my sister and I and then my kids were to pick out all the ornaments we might possibly want, even from among those back on the tree already, even favorites of my moms, and set them aside, and then my mom would pick *back* out the ones she didn't want to give up yet but note down which we wanted, and then we would pack up what we were taking.
I don't think this would have worked at all if my sister and I were inclined to drama - we would have had to do pick one at a time, or do something like the bit in Cryptonomicon with the furniture in the parking lot. But she's the chill one, and I'll fight about plenty of things but not ornaments. There were definitely some I wanted to see *one* of us keep, but might as well be her as me. Maybe five I really, truly cared about: the cloth star that hung between my parents' stockings the Christmas my mom was pregnant with me, the cloth pegasus that hung over my bassinet, the cornhusk doll my mom made when I was a baby of a woman holding a baby, the goofy mylar ball from the drugstore that in my memories is the first ornament I ever picked out for myself when I was like five, although my mom says that's not true, and - I don't know, something else. None of those were at all in contention because they've always been understood to be mine. We had maybe one real moment of conflict where my sister was like "and I'm taking this" and I was like "I think J likes that" and my sister was like "I've liked it for FORTY YEARS" and I was like yup right carry on.
Between me and the kids, we ended up with like five or six shoeboxes of ornaments to bring home. More stuff for me, but less for my mom. She was also supposed to then get rid of the ornaments nobody particularly wanted but as of a year later she has not, and apparently ended up packing a lot of them back away with the good ones she wanted to keep. Two steps forward one step back, I guess.
We cleaned up the water and broken glass and took all the ornaments off and stood it up again and wired it to the wall and redecorated with only non-breakable ornaments, Christmas was saved, yay. (I thought maybe we should get rid of it before it could strike again but this was unpopular.)
And at the same time, we conducted a confusing and occasionally fraught process of "ornament shopping" in which first my sister and I and then my kids were to pick out all the ornaments we might possibly want, even from among those back on the tree already, even favorites of my moms, and set them aside, and then my mom would pick *back* out the ones she didn't want to give up yet but note down which we wanted, and then we would pack up what we were taking.
I don't think this would have worked at all if my sister and I were inclined to drama - we would have had to do pick one at a time, or do something like the bit in Cryptonomicon with the furniture in the parking lot. But she's the chill one, and I'll fight about plenty of things but not ornaments. There were definitely some I wanted to see *one* of us keep, but might as well be her as me. Maybe five I really, truly cared about: the cloth star that hung between my parents' stockings the Christmas my mom was pregnant with me, the cloth pegasus that hung over my bassinet, the cornhusk doll my mom made when I was a baby of a woman holding a baby, the goofy mylar ball from the drugstore that in my memories is the first ornament I ever picked out for myself when I was like five, although my mom says that's not true, and - I don't know, something else. None of those were at all in contention because they've always been understood to be mine. We had maybe one real moment of conflict where my sister was like "and I'm taking this" and I was like "I think J likes that" and my sister was like "I've liked it for FORTY YEARS" and I was like yup right carry on.
Between me and the kids, we ended up with like five or six shoeboxes of ornaments to bring home. More stuff for me, but less for my mom. She was also supposed to then get rid of the ornaments nobody particularly wanted but as of a year later she has not, and apparently ended up packing a lot of them back away with the good ones she wanted to keep. Two steps forward one step back, I guess.
