Growing up, I thought Christmas ornaments were tchotchkes you bought at CVS — shiny, uniform bulbs that came in neat packages of eight. In my secular Jewish family, it never occurred to me that decorating a tree had any value beyond the aesthetic.
And then I met my husband, who comes from a family that takes Christmas very seriously.
The first December that we lived together, we hoisted a tree between our shoulders and marched it down Union Street in Brooklyn to our apartment. I assumed we’d cover it in simple red and gold balls. But instead, he pulled out a tattered cardboard box stuffed with treasures, each wrapped in newspaper or bubble wrap. There were long frosted-glass teardrops and intricate hand-painted globes, frayed felt elves from his boyhood and a kitschy miniature margarita glass from a vacation. It began to dawn on me that there was a whole world inside these little details.
The first Christmas that I spent with my new in-laws, they handed me my own ornament: a bejeweled red handbag, which felt like an invitation to join the family. I hung it from a branch by its chain strap. Every year afterward, my in-laws gave both of us, and later our children, an ornament apiece. Soon, glass peacocks, peppers, violins and roses covered our tree.
One year, a close friend from college brought me a pink silken ballerina, a whimsical doll he found at a market that, for some reason, reminded him of me. I adored it. And I immediately knew where it belonged: atop our tree as a secular, spectacular showpiece, smiling down on us year after year.
Christmas plays a much larger role in my life now, in an interfaith household, than it did when I was a child. For the most part, I find the holiday overwhelming, full of unrealistic expectations and way too much activity. But the ornaments I love.
Each December, I carry an enormous plastic bin filled with ornaments upstairs from our basement so that we can greet each object as it emerges: the golden owl, the blown-glass fish, the hand-painted chaos my children brought home from school when they were little. Now almost grown, they root through the bin looking for the ones that belong to them. They no longer argue over who gets to claim the fabric puppies that bark when you squeeze them. And one by one, all the ornaments find homes on sagging branches, until our tree is dressed up as a kaleidoscope of our family.
The post The Joy of Christmas Ornaments (as a Jew) appeared first on New York Times.
