Christmas Ornament #11: ???

Hey, we made it to the present!  Despite four nights in the hospital this week, we managed to not only buy an ornament, but I even wrote up this blog post!  2 weeks ago, we went into the city primarily to visit the Chicago Art Institute.  (When you live here you just talk about going to "the city".  People never say they're going to "Chicago".)  The art institute is free on Thursday evenings (for Illinois residents) and the girls really wanted to go, so we made the trek and had a good time.  But if you're going to go all the way into the city, you'd better get your money's worth, so we also stopped by the bean, and the Christkindlmarket.  As you can tell by all those words smashed together to make one big word, this is a German thing.  It's a traditional outdoor market where they sell food and Christmas-y things.  So, we stopped by and picked up an ornament.  Now, I know that it was probably mass produced in Asia somewhere, but we'll pretend that it was hand carved by some little German shepherd or something.  Either way, it's from the big city and now lives on our tree.

Christmas Ornament #10: The Fox

Now you finally understand why we move so often.  If we don't move, we don't know what Christmas ornaments to buy.  2013 was our move to St. Charles, Illinois, which sits on the Fox River.  There are a lot of things out here with Fox in the name - roads, shopping centers, ice rinks, etc.  The river runs right through the center of town and has great running paths up and down it.  It was an easy decision to get a fox for our tree last year, though we did have to pick from 3 or 4 different foxes.  As I recall the voting got pretty contentious in the store, mostly because Ella always wants to get her way about everything.  Eventually we settled on this guy with his suspenders and bow tie.

Christmas Ornament #9: Tree

Once again, there's no story here, it's just an ornament we liked.  It's felt circles all stacked up to make a Christmas tree.  But what I think we need is little miniature versions of all our ornaments to hang on it.

Christmas Ornament #8: Reindeer

There's no story behind the reindeer, really, but I think he's super cute.  He's got little wooden legs and antlers and tiny little bells on his blanket.

Christmas Ornament #7: Sweater

We pulled into Midland, Michigan on October 30th, 2010 and realized we were going to have to figure out where we had packed away all of our winter clothes.  The sweater ornament commemorates that move to the arctic north.

Christmas Ornament #6: Snowman

This snowman is an embarrassment to us all.

Without a doubt, this is my least favorite of all our "special" ornaments.  Which means there must be a story here.  The scene is December 2009, and Shannon is 8 to 10 weeks pregnant.  Weeks 6 to 16 of a Shannon pregnancy at our house is a bit like the bombing London in WWII; you hole up, live on whatever rations you were able to carry with you, hope no one dies and wait for it to be over.  December is a busy time under the best of circumstances, but with Shannon mostly incapacitated, it was particularly crazy.  All three of us did make it out of the house for a trip to Walmart in the week before Christmas, and that is not the time or place to find nice Christmas tree ornaments.  But we had to get something, because we were nearly out of time, and there was no way of knowing if Shannon would feel well enough to go shopping another time.  So, this is the least bad of the ornaments that were left.  I have a vague memory of little Julia liking it.

Christmas Ornament #5: Baby Bell

I think this one is pretty self explanatory.  This baby is made just like the Red Hat Lady and obviously commemorates Julia joining the family.  Like the awesome parents we are, there is no ornament for Ella's first Christmas.  (There are barely pictures of Ella.)

Christmas Ornament #4: Red Hat Lady

You might think that our annual Christmas ornament is a big deal at our house, but it's really not.  We put the tree up each year the day after Thanksgiving, and then about a week before Christmas we realize that we haven't bought a new ornament that year.  So, during a regular shopping trip, we stop by the ornament section and see if something catches our eye.  If we don't find anything we like we don't get anything, but we're not all that picky.  This is just to say that we don't visit 20 specialty shops and spend hours searching for the perfect ornament.  We just pick from what happens to cross our path.  Such was the case in 2007 when we stumbled across the Red Hat Lady:

It's hard to see with that feather boa getting in the way, but she has a purple bell body, a red feather boa and a red hat.  When we saw her, we knew she was just too fabulous to pass up.  We didn't know it at the time, but she belongs to the Red Hat Society.  There is great poem by Jenny Joseph titled "Warning" which begins, "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me."  This prompted a woman in California to give a few friends red hats for their birthdays, and then in 1998 the Red Hat Society was formed, which is a social club for women.  Now that I know they're a thing, I've seen a group of them once or twice out having lunch at a restaurant or something like that.  The poem is about how when she is older, she will be able to do unconventional things and "make up for the sobriety of my youth."  So now, when I see our Red Hat Lady, I think a little bit about small acts of rebellion against society's expectations for good behavior.

Christmas Ornament #3: Hula Snowman

In 2006 we moved to sunny St. George, UT.  That meant saying goodbye to white Christmases and hello to being uncomfortably hot for about 8 months of the year.  We needed an ornament that would match our new tropical clime, and found some festive hula snowmen.  Unfortunately, they had a problem: legs.  The 4" snowman had skinny 2" long legs sticking out the bottom.  If you're familiar with snowmen (which the creators of this ornament apparently were not) you'd know that they don't have long skinny legs.  The story has a happy ending though, because one of the snowmen hanging there didn't have legs.  I don't know if it was from an unsupervised kid, or if the snowman had a run in with the mafia, but either way, in our eyes this was a feature, not a flaw, so we bought him.

Christmas Ornament #2: The Disco Ball

Some of our Christmas ornaments have little stories behind them.  Not so much for 2005.  In our search for a new ornament that year, we were at Target and we found this disco ball, and it seemed fun and we liked it, so we bought it.  That's pretty much the story.  I like having a tree with some personality - something that is severely lacking in too many designer trees.