Friends and Stuff

Ornaments of 2001

I began cleaning up Christmas with the plan to sort, weed out, and reorganize our decorations. I hoped to resent the Post-Holiday Fer of 2019 less than I did the 2018 Me when I opened our haphazardly and hastily packed boxes of decorations and ornaments this season.  I imagined myself testing for sparks of joy a la Marie Kondo to determine which tchotchkes to keep and which to discard.  I pictured fewer bins of decor in the garage.  I visualized a minimalist Christmas this December.

I enlisted Middle Sis, Tootsie, and her cousin to de-ornament the tree and my grand plans were quickly abandoned when one by one, the ornaments some of my oldest friends sent to me back in 2001 were plopped in my lap. 

In 2001 my then-fiance/now-husband and I bought our first house.  Amidst counting pennies from our change jar and trying to believe we'd "grow into" our mortgage (as our broker cheerfully reassured us we would), we packed boxes and piled them in the carport for ferrying across the bridge to our new (old) house and neighborhood.  The rental house we were leaving opened onto an alley, as do numerous rentals in the town in which we grew up.  Alleys in Coronado have their own characters, stories, and rules to live by.  Everyone knows that furniture and discards placed along the alley are up for grabs.  And nothing abandoned in an alley lasts long.

But my boxes of Christmas ornaments were stacked temporarily at the top of our carport driveway, nestled against our storage space attached to the house (in lieu of a garage).  Inside those boxes were the ornaments my parents had given me each year of my 30, often with a theme matching a family trip or significant event.  It's safe to say that those ornaments were probably the first, second, or third items I would grab in the event of fire, along with photo albums and some sentimental jewelry.

Needless to spell out, during the short time I and my fiance were away from the house, those boxes were taken.  All my ornaments.  I was crushed.

But because those were the only boxes left there, I figured whoever took them was likely disappointed or at least not interested in the contents and might return or discard them after recognizing their sentimental value.  It was 2001, so I placed an ad in the local paper with a passionate plea for their return, to no avail.  I lamented their loss to everyone I knew.

My parents, it turned out, had some duplicates of our annual ornaments which they gave me.  Family friends and students presented me with new ornaments. 

And then my high school friend group organized to send me ornaments from their current homes across the US.  The dolphin from my friend's annual holiday Hawaii trip is missing its tail, but the significance of not only the ornament, but those annual family trips which don't happen as frequently, sustains.

I learned in 2001 that beloved ornaments, like so many other material things, are just "stuff."  And while seemingly irreplaceable, if those ornaments my buddies sent me 18 years ago were to disappear tomorrow, I'd know that my friends, who remain true and present today, would come through. Instead of new ornaments, their enduring friendship is all I really need.

So sorry, Marie Kondo, this isn't the year for tossing ornaments.  And cheers to lifelong friends, true sparks of joy.