About three weeks before Christmas, our tradition, like that of millions of others, is to decorate the family tree. The only twist on that tradition is my oldest stepson and I do the decorating as my wife takes dozens of terrible photos of me dressed in shorts and an old hoodie.
The other tree tradition is Shana sizing up our work and correcting it. You can’t have the George Brett ornament atop the tree (the hell you say!) and that disfigured snowman one of the kids made 12 years ago needs to go on this branch.
Every year adds to the nostalgia as Rory and I pull aging Christmas balls, candy canes, Santas, lights, stars, snowflakes and much more from two gigantic storage bins. There’s one ornament that gets me every time. It’s arguably the ugliest one on the tree. It’s most certainly the oldest.
The yellow, bell-shaped piece of styrofoam is threaded with blue yarn, and my name’s written on it in some sort of gold-colored glitter. On the other side: “Den 1, Pack 57, ’85.” It’s a piece of art I created as a project in Boy Scouts, with plenty of help from my mom, the Den mother.
Every time I pull the ornament out of the bin, I’m immediately taken back to 1985 in the basement of a church in Lebanon, Missouri, where several boys around a table painstakingly worked to perfect our Christmas treasures.
My memories of being a Scout are few and far between. I will never forget the ceremony when I received my first badge. How can you when you’re hanging upside down in front of dozens of your friends and their parents as they pin the badge on your uniform?
But the memory of working with Mom on that 34-year-old ornament takes me back to some wonderful memories with her at Christmastime. One I cherish to this day is her hauling my brother and I to her craft show at a mall in Springfield, Missouri.
We typically went with Mom on Sundays, leaving our house outside of Russ for the hour drive at about 10:30 a.m. During those trips, we’d listen to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 Countdown, singing along as we cruised down I-44. For a pre-teen who’d recently fallen in love with music, it was the coolest thing in the world.
Like our trips to the Columbia Mall a few years before, the “work” at the Springfield mall was anything but that. Mom was far more generous than my dad with quarters, and my brother and I spent most of our time in the arcade.
Like my family now, our family decorated the tree together, though, largely due to my dad’s famous Christmas spirit, we did so before Thanksgiving even arrived.
Unlike my wife, Mom didn’t critique our work. The only rule was that we had to use the ornaments that had been passed on through the generations, including several my grandmother made as gifts.
Though Grandma passed away in 1987, I remember those ornaments being on the tree into the early 2000s, along with the masterpiece Scout bell. Unfortunately, I lost track of Grandma’s ornaments years ago. Fortunately, I think about them every time we decorate the tree, along with my mom singing Chicago’s “Look Away” as we drove down I-44 30 years ago.