Boo - missed the edit window.
For “super” read “supper”.
Any other fixes needed - do your own- too teary to care!
Too many memories to list…
FYI, the “windmill candle thingie” is a Christmas pyramid. We bought ours in Germany, I’ve always loved them. It comes disassembled, and you get the fun of putting the fins on the “windmill” part. You get it all set up, put the candles in, and once the heat begins to rise, you find out you put the fins in the wrong direction, because it’s running BACKWARDS. Whups.
Put it together correctly, and then you find out that the ANGLE of the fins determines the speed at which the pyramid rotates. It is rather fun to see the pyramid whirl so rapidly that the figures are a blur!
I remember a Christmas store in Rothenburg, Germany, that had a pyramid two stories tall! It was magnificent!
~VOW
Aw, I love your story.
Every year when I was a kid, we alternated tree-toppers–one was a battered tin Mexican (?) star and the other was a cloth angel that had cardboard wings with some kind of lace fabric covering them. My brother and I argued so ferociously over these that my mother stuck a slip of paper in with the ornaments to remind us whose treetopper got put up the next year (my brother preferred the star, I preferred the angel).
At some point during my teenage years, both of these became too tattered to put up and were retired.
So a couple of years ago I decided I wanted the angel to replace the strange silver-white spraypainted tree-topper my partner brought into our relationship. Lo and behold, neither my mother nor brother had a single clue as to what I was talking about…no recollection of any angel…that got put up and/or argued about every Christmas for at least 15 years.
Another ornament story entirely: for years, one of the family ornaments has been a balancing cockatoo made out of celluloid, probably dating from the 1930s or so. He’s a very cool ornament–balances on his tiny hooked talons and sways back and forth. Last year I was demonstrating to my stepdaughter how cool he is–look, you can tap him and he rocks!–and I tapped just a leeetle too hard and he jumped off my hand to the hardwood floor. Oops. Way to break an 80-year-old Christmas ornament :smack:
I did painstakingly refill the cockatoo’s tail with the small metal beads that made him balance and glued the shattered pieces back together. He balances, but doesn’t have the same carefree attitude he once had.
Some time when I was a teenager, my mother bought a three-dimension gold Moravian star for a tree topper. It was made of thick cardboard and had been meant as an ornament, not a topper, so we drilled a hole in it for the top branch of the tree to go in.
The next year, we opened the box of Christmas decorations and I picked up the star and turned it upside down… and a handful of grass seed fell out. Peering inside, I could see a lot of soft fur inside of it too. A little mousie had thought that our Christmas star was a good place for a nest <3