It's the Holiday Season

It will be a strange holiday for me. New job, new town and a temporary living arrangement.  So, I'll have a Christmas tree, but it won't be my Christmas tree since I'm living at my sister's. Who, by the way, really gets into decorating the house for the holiday, as I witnessed when she pulled tub after tub of holiday decor out from storage. This ADD kid got a bit overwhelmed by it all.

Christmas is really very distracting for those with ADD as it is truly the holiday of bright shiny objects! Lights, tinsel and ornaments. 

I'll be honest and say that there were many years when I didn't even put up holiday decorations if I was too busy or not in the mood. Besides, the last thing I would need is something to further distract me. Plus I think single people have to be really motivated to decorate for the holidays.

If your home is small (like my condo), trees can take up a lot of space. I own two "wall trees" that I would hang on my ever-gawdy mirrored wall. These are half trees, so on the wall, they sort of looked fuller - or at least I thought so.

The two trees have different themes. One is my angel tree and the other - no big surprise to anyone who knows me - is a skating tree. (Suddenly I get a visual of tree skating, but I digress.) 

I am SO NOT an angel person, but WAY back in 1988, my mom - who is also a holiday fanatic and should have owned stock in Hallmark - started giving me a Hallmark ornament series - Mary's Angels. As those you who are good with numbers have figured out, I have 21 of these ornaments, with #22 under the tree (hopefully). They are named for flowers and the first one was Daffodil. At least that's my memory of it. I can't be sure because all of my holiday decorations are packed away in a storage unit about 100 miles away from where I am right now. (The photos here are from a website called "Hooked on Hallmark")

I remember opening the gift and looking closely at the ornament and getting a weirded out feeling when I saw the artist's signature on the bottom of the ornament - Mary -was dead-on to my signature when I sign my full name Mary Elizabeth. If you look closely at the ornaments, they also have a very tiny, ridiculously small triangle with a number in it that tells you what number it is in the series.  Even when my eyes were younger, I couldn't read it.

My other tree is the Skating tree that has so many ornaments that I may have to get a bigger tree to hold all of them.  Many of the ornaments were gifts (hmmm, what do you give a skating judge at Christmas???) and sadly, I might not be able to tell you from who or when I got them - except for one. It was the first one and it was also from my mom. It was Christmas 1978 - my senior year in high school. Mom and I were at the Hallmark store at the Mall and I spotted the ornament and begged her to buy it. I really wanted something special to remember my senior year and an ornament with a skating theme seemed perfect. It hung on the family tree for many years. I don't remember precisely when she gave it to me for my own tree, but I've had on my tree for at least the last 10 years.  

It, too, is packed away in storage, in its original box with an old rubber band wrapped around it (that was how my mom would secure all the ornament boxes).  Mom wrote on the back of the box the date it was purchased and "This is Mary's." And it is.