It’s New Year’s Day. Happy New Year to you. It turns out that my wife is allergic to the Christmas tree that has been up in our house for 3 weeks now. Nothing too serious. Just her throat closing up when she’s in the same room with it. But we entertained company on 5 different occasions over the holidays including last night, so up the tree stayed. Until today.
The tree is coming down today and heading out for chipping and mulching. No longer do we live in the neighborhood where we attach trees to old toilets and dump them in the neighborhhood lake for the fish to use as breeding grounds. That’s a blog post for another day. Nope. Out to the curb with it, maybe with an ornament left on it.
Having 5 kids, our tree features a lot of homemade or kid-centric ornaments. I’m guessing a child may have made this one …
Heck, there are even ornaments that I painted many years ago on the tree …
I seem to recall painting more than birds, but whatever. While I was painting bird ornaments, my wife was painting this Rockwellian winter scene …
Show-off. Just take a look at the detail on the barn …
With the lights out, you can look through the barn windows and see a couple goats going at it. Blog censors wouldn’t allow me to show that, so I kept the lights on for the pic.
Anyway, here’s a unique homemade ornament that I don’t think will make it to storage this year. Our dog groomer gave it to us after our dog Lola got her Christmas haircut.
Yep, that ornament is full of Lola’s hair. Once I had that in hand, I thought it was the perfect companion gift to the human tooth ring I had made for my wife from my youngest daughter’s crowned baby tooth.
My wife was unimpressed, even after I assured her that no dog nail clippings were included as filler in the ornament. I think it is destined for the scrap heap. Maybe I can recycle it by removing the dog hair and replace it with something more personal. Hmmm, I am clipping my fingernails today …
Jim Flanigan Looks at the World 