How to use a Christmas tree for time travel

The ornaments tell the story of our family's adventures

Bob put up the big Christmas tree this year.

He didn’t have the heart to do it last year, so soon after Joyce died.

The Fourth of July was Mom 2.0’s big holiday, but Christmas was a close second. About a quarter of my parents’ basement is dedicated to Christmas decorations. That’s only a slight exaggeration.

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They keep them in giant boxes filled with smaller boxes that all fit into the box like some massive Jenga puzzle.

Each year, my folks would load the boxes into the downstairs living room and carefully extract the ornaments and decorations that would fill nearly every corner of the house.

My mom even had a special decoration set for the bathroom.

With Mom gone, Dad doesn’t decorate the whole house. He has a fine sense of design, but that was a two-person job.

Still, he livened up the house with a smattering of decorations.

The big tree is more than a Christmas decoration, though. It tells the history of our family.

There are ornaments dating back to the 1940s, if not earlier, that are fragile heirlooms from my parents’ youth.

There is the round Hallmark ornament with a train in the middle and the year 1975 carved into it. That was the first Christmas my parents spent together after they married.

There’s a red felt stocking with the name “Daniel” written on the top in green marker. I made this with the help of my sister when I was a small boy when she worked at a childcare center down the street from our old Lynner Drive home.

That stocking is an artifact from my early years with Parents 1.0.

Joyce hung it on the tree every year since I came to live with them in 1991.

That’s an honor. There are so many ornaments, my folks could decorate a forest of evergreens. Not every ornament gets on the tree every year.

The ornaments tell stories, some I know and most I don’t.

The gold metal representation of the White House and the white marble-like image of the U.S. Capitol come from summer 1999, when I worked on the baseball desk at USA Today.

My parents flew out — it was Joyce’s first time flying and Bob’s first since he served in the Navy — and we visited the sites together.

That flight gave them enough courage to fly to California and take a cruise to Hawaii that fall to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. That occasion is marked by the ornament that says “Aloha” with the “O” replaced by a flower.

There’s a Spider-Man ornament. That was a gag gift from me to Joyce a couple of years ago. Joyce was a consummate housekeeper. I was a borderline hoarder of toys and other nostalgic items.

When she dusted my room, she sat all the knickknacks on my bed, figuring I would know where they went best. The only one she ever remembered where it came from was a Spider-Man action figure, which was attacked to my lamp with a piece of string and a red magnet.

A small baseball bat and ball hang on one branch. That was from our magical vacation during the summer of 1992.

We visited Cleveland and Milwaukee to see ballgames. We stopped in Akron, Ohio, to watch my cousin Kim compete in the national soapbox derby championships and finished with a stop at the “Field of Dreams” movie site.

The halfway point of our vacation was the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. I got my picture taken next to Mickey Mantle’s locker and Babe Ruth’s bat.

To understand how giving my parents are, neither of them are baseball fans. They spent all this time and money going to ballparks because their second-hand son was crazy for baseball.

Those mementos remind me of just how far my parents were willing to go to make me smile.

There’s an ornament from Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side, where we visited that same summer. I remember staring out at the mists and lamenting that it was such a romantic place, and I had no girlfriend.

Joyce said, “Well, you’re here with us. Enjoy it for what it is.”

Those are words to live by if ever I heard them.

We mere mortals can only move forward in time, but that doesn’t feel so true when I look at that Christmas Tree.

I travel up and down the lines of my life with these wonderful people and lose count of the blessings along the way. That’s Christmas magic, I think.

Bob and I added two more ornaments this year. He didn’t need any more, but these seemed appropriate.

The first was a gift from me, a handmade ornament with a picture of Caitlin Clark. Bob and I watched nearly every game together from her last season at Iowa through the first season of her WNBA career.

She gave us something to root for during that year of firsts without Joyce.

The other new ornament was a gift from my friend Paula, a colleague at school. It’s a glass ornament with Joyce’s face etched into it and the caption "Forever Loved."

That cutline is a double entendre.

We loved Joyce — me, Bob, and everybody who crossed her path.

But with her image on the tree amongst all the other memories of our lives, we also are reminded how much she loved us.

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Daniel P. Finney is a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative, but don’t hold that against them. Please visit their page to view a full roster of writers and consider subscribing to their columns. Writing is hard work; people ought to get paid for it. If you enjoy it, throw them a couple of bucks. They earned it.