Tree Series: #4

There's a Pinocchio, an elf made of reindeer fur, two wooden birds, a cuckoo clock, aluminum icicles, and …a partridge in a pear tree? It sounds like the song.. but almost every ornament on our tree has a story associated with it; certainly, they each have a location that they are tied to. These are the souvenir ornaments acquired in our travels--easy to find, easy to carry home, and guaranteed to bring back memories, at least once each year.

Pinocchio came from our first trip to Italy, when Kay slipped and fell at the Fountain of Trevi, and I carried her, screaming, at least a city block with visions of fractured skulls dancing in my head. That trip was also the one where we forgot to pick up our passports from the hotel desk in Rome and didn't realize our mistake till we arrived in Florence. We were forced to rely on the somewhat dubious Italian postal service to reunite us with our passports, and American Express earned our gratitude for dealing with the police and getting them to allow us to check into our Venice hotel sans papers. We've dined out on that story for years.

The birds were from our first trip abroad (mine, at least) --to London, and I found them at Harrods, a place I had only read about. JC was less than thrilled about browsing through that amazing place, and I remember sulking along as he dragged me to Piccadilly Circus late on the night we arrived, me having had no sleep since we left home, and not being in the best of spirits. That is the sanitized version.

The elf  was from the visit to Russia, where we had accompanied JC after a dioxin conference in Tampere, Finland (the Pittsburgh of Finland, we were told…) That trip was memorable for more than just the ornament. We initially landed in Helsinki, and had been told to take a taxi to the central train station and catch a train to Tampere. Except that the train station burned down the day we arrived, and trains were simply not running. We ended up taking a bus (try this sometime at an airport where everyone is speaking Finnish and you. don't. understand. a. word. The bus sped through the night and all the signs we saw were full of 'i's and 'j's and 'k's and made no sense. Then the bus pulled up to a cinderblock structure in the middle of nowhere and everybody on the bus got out and retrieved their luggage from the storage location under the vehicle. The bus driver basically kicked us off, too, then drove away. After a while ( a long and scary 'while') another bus came along and everybody got on, so we did too. Amazingly, we ended up at a bus station in Tampere only a few blocks from our hotel, but not without a few anxious moments on our part. The Russian side-trip (to St. Petersburg) was somewhat less eventful, but still produced a number of stories..to be saved for another year.

But…you get the idea. There are chandelier prisms that I rescued from a consignment shop in Springfield to serve as 'icicles' on our tree; there are aluminum spirals that I found at the museum in Chadd's Ford, the cuckoo clock that we bought when we were tearing around Germany with the Townsleys, who were stationed in Nuremberg, the very Southern-style miniature door (decked with greens) that we found in Charleston…the collection a veritable travelogue for anyone who knows how to read the ornaments; in short, for our family.

Advent is a lot like our tree; it recaps the history, the genealogy of Jesus. It tells us the story of the people of God, Jesus' family: where they came from, the things they had been through together--and like our tree, Advent brings it all together and ties it in a bright Christmas package, filled with love. It lets us know that, no matter what happens along the way, one way or another, we will always get to Bethlehem, we will always find our way home.