Homemade Christmas Ornaments, East Ukrainian Village, Chicago

In 1995 I was 20 years old. I was in my 6th year of a 7-year-long relationship and we lived together in Kaukauna, Wisconsin. I was 20 going on 40, or at least it felt like it, and I made a lot of homemade Christmas ornaments. Plastic canvas, cross stitch, painted ceramic and wood. I remember being so proud that there wasn’t a store-bought ornament on our entire Christmas tree.

Fast forward through a whole bunch of stuff to the summer of 2001. I was in San Diego preparing to move to New York City. I knew my apartment was going to be small so I packaged the things that meant something to me and shipped them to my parents’ house. All of the rest, I sold. When I moved to Chicago earlier this year my parents brought down some of the things that they’d been storing for me. I was eager to use my closets (closets, can you imagine!?) and I didn’t really have time to go through it all so I stored it away. Last night I went through some of the boxes and found all of my homemade Christmas ornaments.

Yesterday I was talking to Margaret about deer hunting and the shooting that happened over the weekend in Wisconsin. The suspect is Hmong. Margaret grew up in NY state, not a great distance from New York City, and didn’t know what a deer stand was. She also didn’t know anything about the Hmong community and the prejudices they many times face and are going to face in the wake of this weekend’s shooting. And I knew far too much. When I talk about these things, when I hold a Christmas ornament in my hand that I spent hours making almost 10 years ago, it feels foreign. But so familiar. Like it was another life, and yet it could have been yesterday.

I look around me right now and wonder which things that I hold dear, which things I make with my own two hands, will seem foreign to me when I look back at them 10 years from now. My digital camera? This website? Who knows. But one thing is for certain: I am getting fucking old. And sappy.

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