Decorating for Christmas has always been one of my favorite things to do. I swear each year I get the stuff out earlier and earlier. I’m a mid-November decorator for a couple reasons. First we usually travel every Thanksgiving and I love ending one holiday and starting the other seamlessly, and second I like having the decorations around and want to enjoy them for as long as possible. I balance my decorations with Christmas tree ornaments, a nativity and a few individual decor items (I call them jolifiers!) around the house, like large ornaments and a snow globe. Over the years I’ve changed my holiday style, right now I’m into vintage/retro type decorations and Christmas tree ornaments. Real classic items. A lot of old world mercury glass ornaments and small trees and snow globes around the condo. We live in 1,000 square feet so I want to make the condo cozy, but not over crowded.
It was important to me once I married Mike that we develop our own Christmas style. I wanted to build a decor collection that was unique to us and not dominated by my Christmas decorations from years past. Of course I still have my favorites, but we’ve started to build a collection together, items that we both truly love. After all, he was going to help put up all the decorations so I wanted to make sure he loved them as much as I did. It’s truly more fun to put out decorations you love rather than hate. It was also important to me that the decorations meant something to us. It’s a bit of a difficult concept though, how can Christmas decor have special meaning for us? We only shop for it and put it up once a year. And then the genius idea hit me. Ornaments! Buy ornaments that have a special meaning.
We decided to buy Christmas tree ornaments on every trip we took. No matter where we go, domestic, internationally or a short weekend getaway, we buy a ornament. We want to fill our tree with special memories of all the places we have visited. We didn’t come up with this genius idea until after our honeymoon so we had to get a faux Greece ornament. We’ve also forgot to get an ornament once, on our trip to Santa Barbara, CA. We went on a long fall weekend and found a beautiful hand hammered steel ornament, but forgot to buy it. It wasn’t until we got home that we realized this. And just our luck we couldn’t remember the name of the store either. I spent hours on google street views trying to find the store front and was eventually able to narrow it down. I ordered it and gave it to Mike for Christmas last year, he was very surprised and shocked with my investigative skills. I was too!
Some of my favorite Christmas tree ornaments from our overseas travels are the ones with great stories to go along with them. From France we have a fabric Arc De Triomphe that we got in the gift shop after we climbed to the top. From Iceland we have a little puffin, which is the breeding location for the bird. From Budapest we have a traditional hand-painted ceramic egg that we got at a traditional Hungarian market, which is Mike’s favorite ornament. My personal favorite it the Statue of Liberty ornament we got on our Christmas weekend in NYC , she has dangly feet that move! I also love our White House Ornament and the fun time we had being snowed in for an extra day in Washington DC.
In addition to ornaments from our travels we always pick up an ornament at the Christkindlmarket in Chicago. Attending the market is part of our holiday tradition and they have the most beautiful classic ornaments there. We’ve been building our Chicago themed ornaments from here over the years. They have the iconic Chicago landmarks like the Chicago Theater Sign or the Michigan Ave sign.
What I truly love about all the ornaments is we get to relive each trip when we get the ornaments out. It’s a great tradition that we started and one we hope to continue as grown old together. It’s never too late to start collecting ornaments from your travels. You can start at anytime and share the memories once a year!
Do you have any favorite ornaments, maybe from a trip or not, I’d love to hear about your favorites. Let me know below! If this post has you in the Christmas spirit check out my Top 15 Holiday Activities in Chicago!
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