The reindeer is always first.
Or, at least, that has been true since my daughter was three, when she was old enough to have a favorite ornament, one she picked herself from among hundreds crowding a holiday market. Back home, I lifted her up to stand on the arm of the sofa, so her little arms could place the glittery jewel-toned prancer high enough on the tree to catch the eye.
That year, the tree was real, a fat Balsam fir that her other dad and I had picked out from a local nursery, tied to the top of the car, and driven home while singing. I thought we’d be doing the same, decade after decade, the only difference being the size of the girl in the back seat.
A dozen years later, the tree in my house is man-made and pre-lit, its white bulbs emitting the faintest pink light of a winter sunset. Her other dad has his own tree at his condo and she helps him decorate that too. But Christmas always starts in the home where she lives with me and, every time, she chooses the same ornament to hang first: a sparkly reindeer with legs that dangle and reflect the light. She can’t remember Christmas without it.
After my daughter hangs her favorite, it’s time for mine: a pair of red felt mice with big eyes and bigger ears; they have been on every Christmas tree of my remembered life. When I was little, I just assumed they were supposed to be Grammy and Grampy, with whom my brother, mother, and I lived most of the time. But I was also always slightly at war about this: the shorter, round mouse was obviously Grammy, which made the thinner, taller mouse Grampy, except that the real life version was a barrel-chested shoe factory worker.
I once asked Grammy which of the two was supposed to be her, and she snorted, “They’re mice,” as if that settled it. A little more prodding revealed only that Grammy had gotten them sometime in the 1930’s, soon after the depression, after the first of five children came along. My mother was the youngest, which meant that she, like me, had only ever known Christmas with these mice on the tree; to my surprise, she didn’t feel the same sentimental attachment to them. When I asked if I could have the set, my mom shrugged it off, saying they weren’t hers. My grandmother said she couldn’t imagine why I’d want them, but she look very pleased that I did. To this day, when I lift them into place, I refer to them as Grampy and Grammy.
After the ritual of placing our respective firsts, anything goes. Maybe my daughter will grab a popsicle stick ornament composed in preschool or a cow she at age 9 during her fuse bead craze (the cow being as random a design as possible for a girl who never lived on a farm and doesn’t know from mangers). Maybe I will grab the hot-pink one-eyed monster from Mexico City, found in a craft market back when markets were for lingering, not scurrying past in a mask. We might both reach for one of what I think of as the ghosts of Christmas past: a half dozen still-wrapped candy canes of uncertain provenance, which might as well be Twinkies, for their imperviousness to the passage of time.
Mostly, though, I reach for the ornaments with a clearer history. There’s a dolphin from Florida, purchased just five years ago, but loaded with five decades of meaning. When I was little, I only saw my Cuban exile dad in the summertime and it was never uncomplicated; I loved my tia’s cooking and the neighborhood kids practicing for their quinces (the party, not the fruit), but I feared my father’s temper and his drinking. Every summer, he promised to bring my brother and me from Miami to Sea World to watch the dolphin show, but he never followed through. I became obsessed with going to the famed marine park, but the closest I got was a hat he picked up at the airport. Dolphins became synonymous with disappointment.
For our twentieth wedding anniversary, my husband and I took our daughter to Hawaii. The stakes felt high: the vacation took two years to pay for and it was supposed to be the proverbial “trip of a lifetime.” I scheduled a dolphin-watching excursion on a catamaran as the last big hurrah of the trip, a kind of proof that I was an adult who could make dreams come true on his own. But a freak storm shut down the entire island for two days and that was that. Within a year, my marriage went the way of the dolphin cruise.
So why would I want a dolphin on my tree?
Because life isn’t static. Disappointments, like ripples, dissipate, get absorbed into the flow. One year later, I took my daughter to Florida, our first trip as a smaller family. She met my father, with whom I had renewed my relationship after 15 years of not speaking, and it was a joy to watch his pleasure in at last meeting his grandchild. That same week, she and I finally saw dolphins up close in the Florida Keys. The pictures of that day show almost impossibly broad smiles lighting our faces.
Many of the ornaments on my tree were gifts that would mean little to any viewer but me. A glass pear from the director of one of my earliest plays…a seed pod carefully hand-painted by a cousin who claims to hate people…a framed photo of friends dressed like extras in The Godfather. When I look at these ornaments, it’s as if the givers are there. I can almost see their hands reaching toward the boughs, ghost impressions gently moving the air.
In pre-pandemic years, my house was full of people every December for a cookie party, and the tree often sparked questions. “Is that a Dalek?” (Yes.) “You’re a sports fan?” (No. But I love Fenway Park.) “Why do you have Dolly Parton on your tree?” (You don’t???)
“What is that?” comes up more than one might think. It might be occasioned by the weird orange metal squiggle thing from Paris. (French Christmas decorations are a hoot, people). Or the very 60’s pipe-cleaner-in-a-plastic diamond that was my Uncle Russell’s favorite ornament in childhood. (Perhaps because he died at 30, far younger than I am now, anything from his life feels a little sacred.)
I keep a written key to the ornaments, so I won’t forget their backstories, but it’s not foolproof. There’s a mystery yurt that even I don’t know the origin of. Fortunately, no one has yet asked about it. (If someone ever does, I am not above concocting a tale on the spot.)
No explanation is needed for the newest ornament, which features a Black woman wearing her natural curls out, an echo of the girl I am raising in real life. Someday (the further off the better), my daughter will have her own home and her own holiday traditions, and if I want to see her face on Christmas morning, I may have to look at the tree. When that time comes, I will still decorate, but she won’t be there to hang the reindeer first. I’m already grieving the loss and already making peace with it. Things change.
The Christmas ornaments I bring out year after year have magic: they transform a bare tree into a time capsule multiplex. I have friends who feel the same way about dishes they bring out only for Seder or lamps they use for Diwali. No matter the holiday, the best-loved objects carry a distant light to us from a past time; we immerse ourselves in their cumulative glow.
That’s why I cherish my decorations: they are a record of lives lived, even as the years roll forward from joy into grief into joy on a loop we can’t see the end of.
The mice, the reindeer, the ghost hands helping me decorate — they’re my constant, when life is anything but.
What’s your ornament story? Share it below in the comments.
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Previously published on medium
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Photo credit: on iStock