Family Tree Christmas ornaments string together generations, creating new traditions

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For many families, the most exciting unwrapping of Christmas took place weeks ago, when they brought down their ornaments from the attic. Each shimmering glass ball, each crayon-scrawled yogurt cap, each plastic popcorn snowman holds a bit of history – an heirloom from great-grandma’s house in Germany, a kindergarten crafts project, a gift from the hospital gift shop on the day your daughter was born.

What goes on the Christmas tree is as important as what goes under it. Ten years from now, you’ll probably have forgotten the Scooby Doo pajamas and the pocket bike will be gathering dust in the garage. But the ornaments, whether beautiful, unique, funky, strange and just plain ugly, will live on.

That’s what Sandy Pine of Dixmont had in mind when she started the tradition of letting her children pick out their own ornaments at a Bangor shop every year. Though the German glass ornaments are as fragile as a soap bubble, that doesn’t stop Sarah, 9, Abigail, 8, and Chapin, 3, from decorating the tree their way.

Abigail is “pretty much a fruit girl,” and she loves food, so she gravitates toward carrots, kiwi and other “edible” ornaments. This is a “choo-choo” and teddy bear year for Chapin. And Sarah, a budding equestrian, likes horses. And dogs. And “stuff that’s cool.”

“Some of them aren’t ornaments an adult would ever pick out,” Sandy Pine said. “It’s a very interesting-looking tree.”

And that’s the beauty of it.

“When they’re all grown up and gone, I’m going to be looking at the Christmas tree, thinking of all these memories,” she said.

Memories of her family’s Scandinavian roots come flooding back to Cathy Marquez of Orono each time she strings up Finnish paper flags on her tree. As she holds a photograph of her grandparents, who settled in the western Maine town of Hebron, she recalls tramping through the fields of their farm to pick out the perfect tree – or not – as a girl.

“The Finns are frugal and practical, so we had some Charlie Brown Christmas trees some years,” Marquez said, laughing. “They didn’t fancy things up at Christmas, but it was a very important holiday to them in the religious sense.”

Her grandparents, Aino and Daniel Piipo, took great pride in their Finnish heritage, and Marquez hangs the flags in their honor and in honor of her two “aunties,” both in their 90s, who still maintain the family farm.

“That’s the remainder of my Finnish roots,” Marquez said. “I really enjoy sharing it with my children, even though they thought [the flags] were really strange. Now, I couldn’t imagine decorating my tree without them.”

Michele Benoit of Bangor feels the same way about two scratched plastic ornaments that she and her husband, Bangor Daily News Editorial Page editor Todd Benoit, bought their first Christmas together. Three months after they met in 1986, they decided to quit their jobs and tour Europe, and in December they found themselves on the island of Crete.

“It was a freeing time,” Michele said. “We didn’t have the stress of a job, we didn’t know anyone, and all we had were what was in our backpacks. We just had the place, the culture of the place and each other.”

They had rented a tourist flat, and on a small, round table that doubled as Todd’s writing desk, they set up a Christmas shrine, with a paper tree similar to the collapsible crepe wedding bells you see at party supply stores. They made stockings out of paper sewn together with yarn. And they made a harrowing bus trip to the nearest city to buy modest decorations.

“Even though the ornaments are ragtag and a little bit tattered over time,” Michele said, “even as we change the themes of the tree and try to update our decorations and make it more grown-up, these keep coming out.”

For the Benoits, the worn red and gold balls serve as a touchstone. Each year, when they hang them on the tree, they remember the Christmas they spent on Crete and the simple gifts they exchanged. Inevitably, they talk about returning with their two young sons.

“I don’t know if I thought about it at the time, that this was what we were creating: our first Christmas together,” Michele said. “It was more creating our holiday.”

Dick Atlee of Southwest Harbor spent several years creating what he calls the “ornament of my life” – a 30-foot-long handmade chain made of 1-inch lengths of straw. It evokes fond memories of years spent working at Folklore Village Farm in Wisconsin, and he completed much of it while returning to Wisconsin for the holiday celebration.

“I worked on it while traveling on trains, buses, and eventually planes,” Atlee said. “I could feel people watching and sense the tension of their curiosity, but no one asked.”

Now that it’s finished, many people comment on the “natural” look of the three-dimensional straw chain cascading from branch to branch. Though he likes the tree’s aesthetic, the process of decorating also appeals to him.

“There is the sensory act of putting [the chain] on the tree,” he said, “hooking the old plastic lard bucket to my belt and beginning the slow, on-chairs downward spiral rotation around the tree, feeding out the chain, looking for the right branch tips to create a graceful pattern, using only enough chain to keep a gentle curve between branches, and trying to avoiding letting a loop hang out of the bucket, which starts a sudden and rapid emptying of the bucket as the chain ‘pours’ out onto the floor.”

Though it wasn’t such a time-consuming effort, the most memorable ornament for Molly Woodsum of Winterport also was made by hand. Woodsum had gathered her daughters together to make crafty decorations – embroidered ornaments and the like. Her daughter Carrie Edwards, who now lives in Carlsbad, Calif., wanted no part of that, so she took a pair of green and orange striped polyester knee socks and made a tiny stocking.

“We laugh every year getting out this little funny stocking,” Woodsum recalled. “Carrie wanted to do her own little thing.”

At the Bradson home in Orono, the family does their own little thing with an old German tradition. John, Roberta and their daughters Amelia, Julia and Catherine hide a glass pickle among the branches of their Christmas tree, just like Roberta’s mother did when she was growing up. Except her daughters give it a twist.

“We have way too many ornaments for our tree, but we unwrap them all to find the pickle,” Amelia, 16, explained. “Whoever finds the pickle hides the pickle. Sometimes we don’t even know the pickle is on the tree.”

That’s because sometimes, it isn’t. As the tradition goes, whoever finds the pickle ornament gets a small gift. But in the Bradson household, whoever finds the pickle hides it again. It has turned up on a kitchen windowsill, on a potted palm and on the back of the television set. They’ve broken a few pickles over the years, but they always find a new one.

“It’s the only ornament I’d say we feel endeared to,” Roberta Bradson said.

“Whenever we go and buy new ornaments, we try to find something like the pickle,” Amelia added.

They may find something similar, but nothing will take the place of the pickle – and all the memories built around it.

Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 and kandresen@bangordailynews.net.