On the eighth day of Christmas, a Christmas memory gave to me, eight Christmas trees.
Through the years, our family Christmas tree has been through eight redesigns, beginning with our first tree in our little basement house in Idaho, with its homemade ornaments and dollar-store embellishments, to the trees we have now--an upstairs tree and a downstairs tree.
Our old house is a bit backwards. We don't have a basement. Our living room tree is on the main floor, and our family room tree is upstairs. Ever since we turned the big unfinished attic space into a second floor, we have had two trees. I called the one downstairs the formal tree and the upstairs tree the nostalgic tree, but our children quickly renamed it the "fun" tree, and really, they were right.
For all of us, the upstairs tree stood for all the fun we'd had as a family. The tree is covered with every ornament our four children made at school and gifted to us. There is an ornament from every single place we've visited. There are "First Christmas" ornaments and neighbor gifted ornaments, and garland made of wooden thread spools and red wooden beads from my mother's sewing basket. Every piece adorning its branches holds meaning. Every bauble tells a story. It's a happy tree. It's a memory tree.
Tonight, I found a bit of Christmas Spirit nestled amongst the cluttered branches of the upstairs tree.
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