christmas

Christmas Ornaments: Ornaments Filled with Memories

Great minds think alike, I guess?

Matt and I have a tradition of exchanging Christmas ornaments each year. Last year we unknowingly gave each other the same zombies in honor of our love for The Walking Dead. We hang both on the tree. I’ve made him a stained glass pumpkin because he prefers Halloween to Christmas. He’s bought me a field hockey player. I got him a Santa Clause riding a giant fish. It’s meant for a fisherman, but we both loved the movie Big Fish. He gave me an Irish Santa.

Years ago, I gave Matt a blown glass ball with blue waves to represent his company, Tsunami Tsolutions. A few years later, we decorated our tree, ran out, came back and found that the tree had fallen over. A few ornaments had shattered, including the blown glass wave. He asked if I could get it again. I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t bought in on Amazon. I’d found it someplace random. And when I searched Google again for “wave ornament” or “blown glass wave” nothing was coming up.

Meanwhile our friend Maureen had been suggesting for a […]

Christmas Ornaments: Ornaments Filled with MemoriesMaggie Downie2017-12-29T19:31:58-05:00

The Magic of Christmas

And, my mom is rocking this little toddler bathrobe too.

This is a picture of my mom. She’s about three. While she was napping one day, my Grandma decorated the Christmas tree. My mom woke up and discovered the tree aglow. Someone got this snapshot, which is impressive because everyone wasn’t running around with a camera on their phone.

You can see the awe, wonder, and joy that Christmas can bring on her little face. It’s not only Christmas. We can feel wonder at other times and in other places. Usually for me nature inspires those feelings more than anything else.

I pick the places I travel and the activities I do to find a little bit of that astonishment. When you’re 8,000-feet on a snow-covered mountain at night and you look up at the stars, your jaw drops in amazement. I regularly seek the sense of wonder, awe and joy my mom is living in that photograph. It can be harder to find during the daily grind and on a day-to-day basis, but it’s there.

And Christmas is a time of year […]

The Magic of ChristmasMaggie Downie2017-10-25T14:24:28-04:00

The Christmas Tree Goes Up

Every year at my mom’s we get an unusually huge tree. It’s a challenge getting the tree inside the house and up, but a spectacle once in and decorated. This year we got the largest tree we have ever had (12-feet tall by 13-feet wide). It almost didn’t make it in the house.

Normally, the tree we pick looks small outside and huge inside. This year the tree looked enormous before we cut it down. But in thirty years I have never been the voice of reason on Tree Day, so I excitedly supported cutting down the tree.

Once down, all of us pulling together couldn’t budge the tree. We tied a rope to the tree and a rope to the van and used the van to drag the tree on a trailer behind the van. Once home we lined the tree up with the door. Tied a rope to the tree again, ran the rope through the house, ran the rope out a window on the opposite side, tied the rope to the van […]

The Christmas Tree Goes UpMaggie Downie2017-09-12T19:31:40-04:00