This morning this is what the tree looked like. It was the ordinary Sansom Christmas Tree.
Okay, so many people will not say that our Christmas Tree is not ordinary. I even hate to use that word. See if you think that “your” Christmas tree is “special,” it is anything but ordinary. It does not take much to become more than ordinary, and to be honest with you it does not take much to be “special.”
Anyway, when we started the day today, it was just your run of the mill Christmas Tree in that it was up, it was decorated, and it was ready for gifts to be delivered below its branches. It was bring Christmas cheer to the family….
When a Christmas tree brings joy to a family this time of year, it is anything but ordinary. It takes a lot to be extraordinary, but it does not take much to make it “special.” Every Christmas Tree can be special in the eye of every family.
My mother taught me that the beauty of the Christmas Tree was that it was a tree of memories. It was where we hung them every year as we remembered the things we did over the years past. I watched her the few years past, before it became a chore to put the Christmas tree up, and it was like she was telling us something without actually saying anything. My sister and I would help decorate the tree and we would recollect some of the ornaments that would adorn the tree. We were doing more than just looking at individual ornaments, we were recalling the various things that went with the ornaments.
The thing was, the memories that we had with the ornaments were not necessarily when we got the ornament or why we got the ornaments, but what we were doing or other things that might have been going on. For my sister and I, many of our memories on our mother’s tree are associated with our maternal grandmother. There are not a ton of ornaments that she made, but there are some and they are memories associated with a person that was very much loved and very much missed. After all these years, those same ornaments bring us to joyful recollection of a very dear loved one and the memories of things we did together.
Today, however, I found my Christmas mojo and our Christmas tree went from just a lonely tree waiting for something in the corner to a tree filled with pleasures of all kinds underneath.
Normally, I wait until my friend Linn Macie and I can sit together and wrap gifts. It just makes it go faster and it is just more fun. However, sometimes it just is not possible to get together in a timely manner and we end up doing it at the last minute. With the mood I have been in lately, I decided that I would be better spent wrapping gifts that putting out the rest of the Christmas decorations. I needed to make sure I had obtained the gifts for all of the people on the list anyway. I had not kept track of things as I had been buying a few things earlier in the year. I had an idea of what I had but I was not 100% certain that I had not already bought for certain people.
So this afternoon, my children came home to a Christmas tree that looked like this. Their eyes were big and bright and joy filled the room. I have to say that joy filled my face to see it. The younger two did take a peak at the names on a couple of the gifts but they were good and did not touch them. I have to confess that most of the gifts under the tree are for people that do not reside in this house. Some of these were gifts from their Grandma “Tony” Saunders that I wrapped and placed under the tree on her behalf. I might have accomplished a lot, but I am not crazy enough to put out every single gift I bought for my boys before Christmas. I do very much believe in the magic of Christmas and that very much comes with the surprise element. There is only one gift under the tree for the boys that is from their mom & dad. The rest are for their cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents who will be here on Christmas.
I am glad to have accomplished this much at this point. It gave me that sense of accomplishment and completion. I checked this off the check list of things to get done. All the “other family members” are done and wrapped, except…there were four still to do. The point was that I knew exactly what I needed to do. That overwhelmed feeling started to shrink away and I felt much better about things in general.
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