The Broken Ornament

     

       I took down our Christmas tree a couple of days ago. Actually, I took down our four trees. The tree in the family room is the pretty one. All the ornaments are color-coordinated and the children do not help me decorate it. (My sons do not help me decorate at all anymore, but if they did, they would not be allowed to decorate the family room tree.) I have a small tree in the nook above the fireplace with nativity-themed ornaments. There is another small tree that sets on the counter in the kitchen. It displays food-themed ornaments.

Finally, we have a tree in our sitting room, right off the kitchen. This tree, though it’s old and really needs to be thrown away, is my favorite. On it I hang all the special ornaments. There are the teddy bear ornaments my mom-in-law made for our first Christmas. There are several ornaments my boys have made for me—I love the ones with their cute little faces framed on them. On this tree I hang the ones given to me as gifts—the Sorting Hat from a student this year, the penguin from a teacher friend years ago, the simple red ball given to me by my college friend, Josh, the slippers from my dear friend, Julie, the “Our First Christmas” from my sister, Gina.

            After Christmas, as I carefully stripped this old tree of my ornaments, I broke one. A hand-painted ball that had hung from the limb of my tree for the past seventeen Christmases. “Oh no!” I gasped and started crying, as if I had hurt a dear old friend. The ornament itself is not worth much. It’s just a thing. I barely know I have it except at Christmas time. But it was given to me by a couple of my students during my second year of teaching—Stephanie and Emily Rust. Their mother painted it for me. And even though it has been years since those girls were in my class, and even though they were only a couple among hundreds of students I’ve known, I think about them every Christmas when I hang that ornament. It’s not the thing itself I valued; it’s the sweet reminder of these girls and the whispered hint that I have mattered to a lot of kids over the years. I’ve been doing this teaching thing for a long time, long enough to have done a lot of good in a lot of people’s lives and long enough to have been abundantly blessed by all those same kids. Long enough to have broken ornaments.

            I keep track of the Rust family a little on Facebook. Stephanie is a high school teacher in the same county I began my career, the same county where she was my student. She was my student when I barely knew what I was doing. She and her family were a great blessing to me in those rough first years of teaching. I hope that as she decorates her home for the holidays each year she will have reason to give pause and reflect on the children who she has loved and served. I hope she is given so much love that her tree becomes crowded, the limbs heavy, and that she will have to get another tree to hold all the good memories she has collected. And no matter how many ornaments she might break, I hope she remembers she is doing wonderful things in the world that will last far longer than any decoration ever could.