Christmas: Mine to Keep

A veteran cardboard chest-style box (with a tired and saggy, but still functional flip-up lid) stores our Christmas ornaments most months of the year.  Today I climbed the drop-down stairs to our cramped little attic and assisted in its escape to the living room.

Johnny Mathis dreamily serenaded me (I’m dreaming of a white Christmas) while I delicately unveiled each tissue-wrapped ornament, relishing in my favorite blown-glass hummingbird and butterfly, the redbirds in the nest that tuck back near the tree’s trunk, and other time-tested favorites.  Finally the collection of interesting orbs, snowflakes, angels and more lay displayed on a coffee table next to the tree, awaiting their respective branch assignments.

A small box remained quietly in a bottom corner of the chest, enclosed in a Ziploc bag. I knew its contents – an old, rather worn-looking heirloom ornament kept for posterity rather than personal use. I hadn’t looked inside that box for several years, but somehow today it called to me.

I flipped the lid.

A familiar note on yellow lined paper from my mother-in-law (dated December, 1997) stared back.  It was written when her life was defined largely by cancer and debilitating treatments, three years before she passed away. Beneath it, nestled in tissue paper, lay a smudgy globe holding figures of baby Jesus and an angel.

This ornament is a relic from my in-laws’ first years of marriage.  It’s probably seventy years old, something my mother-in-law displayed with her decorative plates throughout the year rather than just at Christmas-time. As I cradled it in my hand, I felt mystically grounded, almost as if progressive existence threw its arms around me and called me home beyond time…and every Christmas since the very first one was mine to keep.