Christmas acts as a landmark in the calendar of many families. Photographs from Christmases past capture fleeting moments in time and offer an annual record of change — a visual representation of babies transforming into teenagers and generations shifting. Often, these are set against a backdrop of familiar decorations hanging from the tree: the one thing that doesn’t change much from photo to photo.
My personal memories of Christmas as a child center around the festive trimmings my mum brought out each year. The cardboard box which stored these family treasures for the rest of the year had a musty scent that tickled my nostrils, but it was as much a part of our family Christmas as a turkey dinner and the gifts under the tree.
Our tree didn’t follow a color scheme, and we never contemplated replacing the gaudy metallic garlands hung from the ceiling, or the dog-eared wall-hanging of Santa’s sleigh being pulled by his loyal reindeer. The hodgepodge of decorations were familiar friends who made an appearance each December, no matter how mismatched they were. Alongside the store-bought ornaments was a string of sickly-peach French knitting my sister had crafted, proudly displaying cards sent by friends and neighbors. A paper plate I’d decorated with pinecones and a candle sat center stage on the dining table. There was no hierarchy, save for the beautiful fairy in her yellow crepe-paper skirt who watched over our family from her vantage point atop the tree’s spiky apex.
When I moved away to study, I begged my mum not to decorate the tree until I arrived home for the holidays. Rifling through the decorations on my return felt more poignant than ever. The mixture of baubles — fragile glass orbs that had originally belonged to my grandparents mingled with modern plastic counterparts bought in bulk from the local Woolworths — made me nostalgic for Christmases past. The decorations were a constant in an ever-changing world. Colors and styles went in and out of fashion, but it didn’t matter. Every decoration in the cardboard box, no matter how outdated, made its way onto the branches of our tree, even the most threadbare swaths of tinsel.
My favorite decorations were a set of paper lanterns my mum brought had back from Singapore in the early 1960s. To me, they represented the exotic — a faraway place I could only point to on a map — and my mum as a young woman. The lanterns were a tangible link to a bygone time and place, somewhere I had never been, but felt a connection to. When I returned to university, Mum took two of the lanterns from the tree, flattened them, and placed them in a creased paper bag.
“For your own tree,” she said, as she handed me the crumpled package, an heirloom as precious as gold.
By the following year I was engaged, and my then-fiancé-now-husband and I bought a 3-foot artificial tree and a box of glitter-encrusted baubles, but the paper lanterns were in pride of place — a link between the present and the past. Each year that followed, the lanterns elicited the same gut reaction and made me feel closer to my mum, even though we were 150 miles apart, which was especially poignant at Christmastime.
Years passed. In December 2007, when I was heavily pregnant with our son Zachary, a friend gifted me a tree decoration she’d bought overseas. Remembering how important the Christmas ornaments of my childhood were to me, I earmarked it as a decoration which would hang on our tree each year until Zachary left home, when it would leave with him to tie his own childhood Christmas memories to those he’d make as an adult.
This evolved into an annual tradition where Zachary chooses a new decoration for the tree. When he moves away, he can take the random selection of items he’s chosen throughout his life and remember Christmases past.
The downside of this is that one day my own tree will be missing key ornaments that will remind me of Zachary’s childhood. If I could start over, I would buy two of every decoration he chose, placing one safely in a box for his future tree and having another on display as part of my own haphazard collection — something I urge anyone thinking of adopting this tradition as part of their own celebrations to do.
Christmas decorations are miniature time machines. They are a prompt for reminiscing and sharing family history, an echo of a moment in time.
As both a child and a parent, I will forever value our family’s decorations and the memories they hold. I hope my son will, too.
