Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Unwrapping Our Pandemic Ornament


Box after overflowing box of ornaments. Our collection has grown to many more than can gracefully adorn our tree. My son, Cole, and daughter, Ashley, climb high and bend low to find the perfect spot to display each precious ornament while I tell each ornament’s story. There’s a pair of glass booties that family friends gave my parents when I was born, a cross-stitched teddy bear I made in middle school Home Ec that hung from my grandparents’ kitchen doorframe for years, a beaming bride and groom for the year my husband and I married, and hand-painted plaster ornaments Cole and Ashley made in preschool. Each ornament has a story and symbolizes an important part of our lives.

The prime spot on the tree is saved for our annual family ornaments that we have added since my son was born. This year, as I carefully unwrapped the tissue from each ornament, I was shocked to see we already had one for 2020. I thought, “That can’t be right. We aren’t supposed to buy our 2020 ornament until Christmas Eve.”

Like many others, my husband’s family has a tradition of converging on a local mall for portraits with Santa. It’s not coordinated for just any day during the holiday season. It must be Christmas Eve day. This event is intentionally planned to procrastinate until just hours before Santa is set to fly off with his reindeer and deliver gifts to all the good boys and girls.

My in-laws still insist on memorializing their five grown children each year with the big, jolly man. And the group of five has now more than doubled as their oldest children have married and multiplied. The expanded and disorderly crowd squeezes around Santa and his red velvet chair for this annual tradition.

The elves patiently capture a photo of us all smiling, and then our crowd hunts down the mall kiosks as swiftly as Santa pursues a plate of chocolate chip cookies. Circling the kiosk, we inspect the festive selection in our quest for the perfect family ornament. Like any good hunter, my mother-in-law still finds unique personalized ornaments with enough spaces to list each family member in her growing brood.

My family of four examines each ornament option to find the one for our tree – reindeer, snowmen, gingerbread families, mittens of all shapes and colors, stockings hung perfectly on the fireplace, smiling marshmallows piled on top of a cup of hot chocolate. You name it; there’s an ornament with it!

My husband reminded me that last Christmas, we had scored big; not only finding our 2019 ornament, but discovering the perfect ornament for 2020. Four smiling Eskimos bundled up in warm fluffy coats. We had never broken the tradition and pre-bought an ornament. But we were looking forward to our June 2020 Alaskan cruise with my extended family and the ornament encapsulated a special part of the year ahead. We weren’t sure if we’d ever see that ornament again and had to have it.

Needless to say, 2020 took a very different turn and we weren’t able to take that Alaskan cruise like we had hoped. Our 2020 Christmas traditions look starkly different, with Zoom get-togethers and Santa photos with grandpa at home. We won’t be seeing Santa or hunting down kiosks at the mall this Christmas Eve, so perhaps our 2020 ornament does sum up our year and it will forever remind us of the year we made new merry little traditions.


Shelley Lester 

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