Merry Christmas From The Family

I did a difficult thing today. It was very difficult for I had so much invested in it.

Zack came over a few days ago and brought all the Christmas stuff down from the attic. I have sorted through boxes of ornaments, tree lights, outside lights, garlands, bows....and old Christmas cards.

I threw away old, cracked homemade salt dough ornaments (made in 1988). That was so much fun! We were living in San Antonio. After supper each evening, we all sat at the kitchen table and made ornaments with cookie cutters and other utensils. Then I put them in a low oven to harden. We painted the ornaments the next evening with tempera paints. All five of us enjoyed that project. On afternoons while Clu Flu worked, the kids and I made gift wrap paper. I bought large rolls of "plain brown wrapper" paper and white butcher paper. Then, I cut sponges in different shapes and we used tempera paints again.

All our ornaments collected over so many years are special. I still have construction paper ornaments the kids made in grade school. We always bought a Christmas ornament on trips, and I gave the kids 2 or so new ornaments each year.

I was able to toss quite a bit of stuff and even moreso today when Zack helped me go through all of it. His sensible approach made a difference.

The hardest part of all this was tossing 17 years of saved Christmas cards. Each year, I would go through most of them, re-read attached newsletters and admire special cards. One of our friends handcrafted her cards, long before scrapbooking tools made it simpler to do so. As I untied a year's worth of cards, I noticed that over the last few years, the number of cards had become smaller. Friends and family just were not sending cards as in the previous years. There has been a considerable drop in the number of received cards this year.

I almost didn't send cards this year even though sending Christmas cards is my favorite tradition of Christmas.

I hope sending cards doesn't go completely go away.