Our son was the first of our family to actually be born in Texas(though I moved to Texas at the young age of 3 months from Louisiana and my husband was born in Hong Kong).  We came up with this ornament idea - painted part of the Texas flag onto a star ornament, surrounded it with familiar cowboy para-phanalia, and imprinted our tiny baby’s footprint on the front of the star.  He’s four years old now, and his foot would completely engulf the entire ornament.  I’m so glad we have this fun ornament to always remember how tiny he once was.

On the back, I wrote

The Wong’s - A great place to hang my hat!

Xmas 04

Smore, what is it?
I asked my newly wedded wife while we were camping around the Banff area onour honeymoon. I never heard of it. My wife kindly explained to me that it was a treat made of roasted marsh mellows, Graham crackers and Hershey chocolate.

There is no way you could find marsh mellows, Graham crackers and Hershey chocolate around here.

We were up on the mountain area. There were no Safeway, no London Drugs or any other stores around here. My wife spotted a tiny corner store in a one street town. She suggested to check it out. I though to myself, “Sure, go right ahead. You must be nuts.” She went and came back with a box of Graham cracker, Hershey’s bar and a bag of marshmellows on her hand. My jaw dropped. She said that there was not much in the store but there was a smore’s corner.

On our 1st Christmas, we spotted this smore ornament in a store and both of us thought “this is it”. Oh well. Everytime, I saw this smore ornament, I was reminded how wrong I was quick to judge base on absolutely no facts but my own presumptions. My wife and I got a good chuckle out of this ornament all the time.

Beside scrapbooks and photos, Ornaments are an unique way to capture a part of your history.  An Ornament  is memories molded into a physical form that you can touch and see. It opens up a door to the memory lane. It is a physical hook into your sea of memories. When I hold an ornament that my wife and I specially bought or made, I was kind of transported back to the events of that year, the ups and the down, the good and the bad, the exciting days and the mudane ones. All mingled into the ornament in my hand. My wife and I would spend the next ten to fifteen minutes talking about what had transpired that year. Sometime it moved us to dig out photos or other things to show what happened back than.