Christmas blues

I knew it was going to happen. I have felt it in my bones for years and it finally happened this past Sunday. The death of my Father's Christmas ornament. I don't know how old it was or even the history around it. I supplied that in my imagination when my mother gave it to me about a dozen years ago.

  The mythology I invented went something like this. It was bought by my grandfather in the nineteen-twenties, when he was happy with his wife and didn't drink too much. He had a job and life was pretty good.
   Or maybe it was an ornament off the tree at Uncle Willie's house, where my Dad stayed for a while during the depression and he took this box of ornaments from his house after his Uncle died in the late fifties to remind him of if not a great man a good man who was the rock of his family, who was always there when he was needed by his parents or by his nieces or nephews.
  I remember the ornaments hanging on our trees during the nineteen-sixties.

They would hang with the cheap plastic ornaments that I now treasure, the ones filled with all the Christmas memories of growing up waiting for my dad to come back off the route to open presents. Or the time I stood in the doorway of my room at two in the morning while CBS played a Christmas Carol over and over on the TV, my Dad asleep in the chair. Or the time, I was very young, Bonanza was still on, it was a Christmas Sunday and had gone to bed, but couldn't sleep. I came out to my mother sitting on the floor cleaning up, her asking the usual "Why are You up?", me crawling into her lap and telling her I felt bad that her and Daddy got nothing for Christmas, Her saying that they got enough and it was OK.
  These are the memories that were in that ornament, which will now be in the ornaments like the bird that has been on every tree as far back as I can remember, as well as the cheap plastic nineteen-sixties ornaments that I now love.
  I even have a collection of Hallmark ornaments that have memories of when I first moved out of my parents house after my Dad died and I lived up in Stony Point. Every

Hallmark ornament that has to do with Mickey or I love Lucy or the Wizard of Oz is filled with memories of Teri and I, when we lived in Nyack and life seemed easier, a little simpler. We weren't so old back then.
  Christmas is filled with so many memories, some like the girls first Christmas were magical. I have a video of it.
  I guess I will get over the death of the ornament. I even took pictures of it in case it were to happen. When it did it was just like I thought it would happen. Someone was anxious to put up decorations on the tree and it's hook caught the one that was being picked up, it went up just high enough to clear the box, that was sitting on the floor. I heard it shatter and even before I looked,

 I knew what had happened. I didn't get mad, I kind of just sagged and went to get the broom. Teri ever the one to take care of bad situations cleaned it up and I just got lost. I was told several times how sorry they were and I know they were. It was an accident, sad but true and it could of happened at anytime. It was just it's time to die. Just as it wasn't it's time when Teri's cat toppled the tree in Nyack. It survived while several of Teri's ornaments didn't. Again it was just it's time, just like it will all be our time someday.