Christmas Ornament Memories

Over time you start to collect Christmas ornaments. Some may be from places you visited you want to remember. Some maybe gifts from friends or family. Some may represent a hobby or interest you have. Whatever the reason you have to obtain your ornaments within a short time span you may have enough to cover a Christmas tree.

For many years I didn’t put up a tree in the condo I was living in. I lived alone and spent most Christmases at my mother’s house. This didn’t stop me from being given Christmas ornaments from my students. I had a thriving collection of tin school houses with my name engraved on the bottom. There were also a few hand-painted or crafted by students. Those I cherished and still have. The tin school houses seem to have disappeared over time.

One year about fifteen years ago everything changed. I decided to not only get a tree but start collecting ornaments for the tree. I started working as an educational trainer that year and spent many weekends flying around the United States teaching other teachers how to use an online educational site then called Marco Polo. (I taught over thirty training sessions over the year and a half I worked for them) I decided to try to find an ornament to represent each training that I conducted during that time.

Some of the ornaments represent the actual place I visited and some represent what I learned from that training.

The final ornament I am going to share with you is Santa on a tractor. It represents a training I did in Pleasant Plains, Illinois. While getting ready to leave the training, I saw a school bus full of teens drive by. It was the middle of the summer and I didn’t think they were summer school students. It was explained to me by a teacher at the school that they were coming back from the fields after a day of detasseling. Detasseling is the process of taking the pollen-producing tassel out of the corn stalk. It sounded like hot and tiring work. The teacher was shocked I had never heard of it.

JDaniel and I rifled through my box of ornaments to choose the ones that would decorate our Christmas tree this year. Our tree is tiny and didn’t need many ornaments so we only selected a few. The ones I described to you above are the ones we selected to put on the tree along with a couple of colored balls and a few other ornaments.

JDaniel loves each of the ornaments for different reasons than the ones I selected them for. He loved the plane and the tractor because he loves vehicles of all shapes and sizes. The dove he said looked pretty. The tree was due to its texture.

No matter what the reasons were for his selections when I look at them on the tree, I remember trainings that I went on all those years ago that inspired them along with the wonderful and challenging people I met on my journeys.