ShinyBrite Christmas...

When I last posted about our Mendocino National Forest tree cutting adventure I was too caught up in our 'Silver Tip' Christmas tree's physical idionsyncracies to recognize its archetypal beauty...

Sort of reminds me of Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face: the quirky bookstore bohemian transformed into international cover girl.  Our tree is looking very Oh Tannenbaumesque all of a sudden, glimpsed here in our bay window through the Victorian-trim pocket doorway...

On our tree the old and new mingle comfortably.  I have my grandmother's complete collection of dimestore ShinyBrites from the year she married & set up her own first Christmas tree in 1938, and every year since our marriage in 1989 we've added a few new ones.

The Unicorn in Ashland, OR is our favorite source for wonderful silvered glass designs we never seem to see anywhere else.  This year's ornament is a gorgeously detailed hammered copper craftsman-style lantern with bas-relief pinecones.  The tinsel is true, vintage tin... I found a cache at a local thrift store still in the original boxes with Rosenberg's Department Store price tags! 

The ShinyBrites are hard to photograph... I always seem to catch them out of focus.  Doesn't it look as if these were shot out in the rain?  My ShinyBrites are slowly dying; their pigments fading, glitter sloughing away like the dust from butterfly wings.  Every year at least one implodes in my careful hands leaving only a small pile of brilliant, jagged confetti... I tell myself this will be their last Christmas in the window, but by the next year I concede "just one more..."  I have already lost so much -- the key people and places of my childhood are irretrievably gone.  Can I really stand to lose these too?

I've decided not to assume an art conservator's role with my ShinyBrites.  I'd rather treat them like the people and places they evoke... beloved and celebrated each in their moment, mourned and released each in their passing.  Slowly, inexorably old favorites give way to new.  The ornament collection my girls will receive in their adulthood may differ in content from what I have today, but hopefully the neural pathways illuminated into our family's past will beckon just as brightly as with the torches cast by these delicate, glittering ShinyBrites...