Heirlooms and Chick Trees

Christmas time! I love this time a year. I’d like to thank Baby Jesus for being fully responsible for this wonderful holiday! I’d also like to thank my friends and family for being supportive when I eat one too many Christmas cookies, turkey and cheese pinwheels, and oh… the sinful holiday martinis. I will, by the end of the month have eaten in excess of around 5, 000 calories per day. But, with all the Christmas decorating, shopping, and stressing…there’s certainly a fair deduction for those. So anyway, I put another tree up…every woman should have a “chick tree” in addition to the family tree…

For my “chick tree”, I decided to use two of my favorite colors (red) and (black). I purchased stiletto shoe ornaments, 1 wedge ornament, a nail polish ornament, and a handbag ornament… I was also given a sweater ornament and a girl shopping ornament… I threw in a few others and used a zebra print piece of cloth and some pearl garland to accent under the tree… keep in mind, none of this stuff came from the local tractor supply store… sometimes a girls gotta travel to get her goods. I love Garden Ridge! I topped the tree with a big red heart… symbolic of my love of love… and my profession… I make matches you know!

Oh, now for the super good stuff…every woman should have an heirloom piece or two or three or three thousand. For me, my first memorable heirloom piece was a ring from my maternal grandmother that she gave me when I graduated from college. The ring had once been hers and will be passed down for years to come (if I can part with that beautiful piece!). My next true heirloom was given to me by my mother and father before I wed CPC. It’s a beautiful pair of silver champagne goblets. The goblets were used to toast at my parents wedding and were used again at my own wedding on August 2, 2008. I have great photos and have the goblets on display in my bar at our house. Now, my most recent pass me down was on the borrow to own plan. We’re all familiar with this plan. You let someone borrow something and eventually you find yourself asking them if you can borrow it because they’ve borrowed it so long they’ve become the owner. My mother collected snow villages and I now have her village on my fireplace. I love each intricate piece of Department 56 snow village! We have the courthouse, hospital, cantina, church, home, general store, tree lot, 3 nuns singing, people skating, snowman standing, dog house.. you name it… I am looking forward to adding on more and more each year. This year I added a phone booth and a couple dressed to the nines to go out on the town.

Now, let it be known-it’s not the jewelry, the art, the goblets, the adorable mini world statues that make heirlooms so special… it’s the memories. I still remember putting up our Christmas tree as a family every year… and we finished up with putting up each detailed piece of snow village together to set the scene of a Winter Wonderland. Now, I find myself putting every piece in it’s special place and laying every thing out just as I was taught. Heirlooms are nostalgic. Sidenote: Speaking of nostalgic cleaning out your old emails can be quite nostalgic…I had 3,500 unchecked messages that I began sorting through today (more on that later).

So, even though my heirlooms haven’t yet attained the “been around for 100’s of years” status… my dining room furniture has (that’s another story)! By the way, we had our first snow of the year (and probably our only!)… It’s beginning to look a lot like……..CHRISTMAS!





(Here you go, Lizzy boo!)