Have a crafty jolly Christmas...

We finally put the tree up today-- due to the family cat being a bit on the schizophrenic side (ok, maybe more than a bit), we've been putting it up later and unable to use many of the ornaments we used to because she's a tree-climber. But we did come across some old ornaments that I needed to add to my personal stash. So in many ways, this post is a tribute to my mom, from whom I picked up most of my craftiness because she was doing stuff with me like teaching me to sew as soon as I was old enough to get how the machine worked.


When I was young, Mom started the tradition of making ornaments each year, and setting one of the resulting ornaments aside for me and one for my brother, so that someday when we both move out we'll have some ornaments to get started with for our own trees. These were some of the results:







(I think you can tell I'm a child of the 80s based on materials alone, but they're cute.)















And, of course, as I got older, I began to help her with the ornaments, the earliest ones being these painted ceramic ones.

Of course I jumped all over the Tweety one, because hey, music.


And I also helped with these seashell ones and the elf.

But she still made these ones for us. (I need to fix that bottom one...)

I'm at the point now where I can start making some of my own. Both of these were from a couple years ago-- the beaded snowflakes were from a kit (clear on cream background, brilliant of me), and the cat is made from polymer clay, much of which was painted, and a firm belief that Christmas ornaments feature too many trumpets and not enough flutes.

I'm glad for this tradition now-- when I eventually have my own tree, I think it'll be a lot more meaningful to have ornaments with some actual meaning and memory behind them rather than the cookie-cutter storebought ones. And if I ever have kids of my own someday, I hope it's one I can carry on with them.

On a less nostalgic note, having come to the conclusion that I need my own Christmas tradition anyway, I'm seriously considering making some ornaments for myself as well this year. I hope it's not too ambitious on my part, as I have Nicole's present to work on, as well as a need to get started on my swap stuff. I did get some supplies for the main project yesterday. At this point, I'm thinking perhaps I should concentrate on that more after Christmas is done though.

On a non-related note, if anyone who's familiar with how Blogger works is reading this, can you please explain to me how to avoid getting these stupid huge gaps between things in multiple-picture posts? I've been trying with the formatting since I started this blog, and I just can't seem to get it!