Painting Christmas Ornaments

The tree is up and we have completely covered it in ornaments with no room for garland or tinsel.  Each ornament brings with it a strong flow of memories: a time, a place, a feeling.  It tells the story of my little family and provides a framework for those memories.

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My wife introduced me to the tradition of painting Christmas ornaments early in our marriage.  It is something her mother did when Jennifer was a kid.  After Thanksgiving we would head over to Michaels or Hobby Lobby to acquire that year's supply of unpainted ornaments and new brushes/paint.  In Indianapolis she used the dining room table to set up shop and even got me to paint my first ornament which was a lighthouse.  I concentrated all of my creative energies into that one ornament night after night while Jennifer worked through several others of differing complexity.  It was great stress relief from the pressures of Medical School and gave us time to talk in our cozy apartment while Christmas music played in the background.

In Washington DC, our rental house had a knotty pine basement with a matching bar that became our Christmas ornament painting headquarters.  Once again, I worked on my one ornament while Jennifer cranked out several others.  That year I painted a train in memory of my Grandpa who we called "Poppy."  He absolutely loved trains and had rode the rails as a young man during the Great Depression.  He had several large picture books of trains, record albums of train sounds, framed pictures of trains, and for a time he had a large train set that spanned his living room.  I signed that ornament "Ol' Roy" which was his given name.

These days Jennifer has quite the ornament painting operation going.  There are now special craft bags to hold and organize all of the paints and supplies as well as clear plastic containers with dividers to hold the unpainted ornaments she has accumulated.  My participation stalled five years ago, the Christmas prior to Anya's birth.  The last ornament I painted was a collaborative effort that Elias and I worked on when he was five.  It was an airplane.  He painted each body section a different color which I cleaned up and added to.  The past two years it has been mostly a mother-daughter thing with Jennifer and Anya, but the tradition continues and I imagine Elias and I will be sucked back into it in future Christmases.



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