The one I made

When I left home, Mom gave me a select number of ornaments off of our family tree to take with me....namely some of the ones I had made. Obviously, she wanted to keep some of them, and rightly so. Yet she willingly gave me a certain one, an odd one among all of the others.

This ornament was made from recycled greeting cards. Not just any greeting cards....but greeting cards from the 60, 70s and 80s, SO much fun to look through. Not only that, they were the cards of my 7th grade Social Studies teacher, Mrs. Mayfield.

Our middle school was an ancient building downtown. By ancient I mean built in the 20s, with no air conditioning to speak of even in the years I attended, 1990-92. The classrooms had 17-foot ceilings (or so it seemed), and the linoleum was scuffed and dulled. Chipped paint on every wall showed the four or five other colors they had been painted previously.

It fit right in, then, that we would use old greeting cards to construct decorations for our trees. They were easy to get, cheap, requiring no approval from the school district's accountants....and yet we students acted as if our teacher had bought personally for us the finest materials to work with. We were just glad to be able to make something like this instead of enduring "busy work."

Mrs. Mayfield came up with this idea as a last-few-days-before-Christmas class project. Even the kids who didn't try at anything were really excited about this endeavor. It put everybody in the Christmas spirit. Even kids who fought outside after school were sharing glue, scissors, and complimenting each other's designs. I can still see the interaction in my mind's eye; it was amazing. I watched it in awe.

This particular Christmas was a sad Christmas for my family. Dad was right in the middle of his 18-month tour as an Army officer to Panama. It would just be Mom, my sister (4 years old at the time) and I celebrating this year. Mom didn't put our tree up until the 18th this year....I think she couldn't wait to take it back down, either.

I tried to bring holiday cheer into the house any way I could this year. Even though it was just a cardboard ornament, I carried it as if it were a fabrege egg. I couldn't wait to show Mom and Emily.

I carried this little trinket of an ornament home, carefully holding its golden string. I placed it on the tree and surveyed how it looked amidst all of the others. It was beautiful....though just a simple craft from the clumsy hands of an awkward 12-year-old.