The tall Christmas tree in Nicole Mackoway's home is hung with glowing balls and a small selection of old ornaments passed down from one generation to the next.
You may admire it for its carefully-arranged mix of modern shine and old-fashioned beauty. But it's only when you sit down with Mackoway that you truly understand what it's all about.
"I was about 16 and I grew up in rural Alberta and we didn't have a ton of money but my mom was just a crack at making handmade ornaments," she says. "She had cancer and she passed away three years later."
While there are several of her mother's ornaments that survived from that time, one set stands out to the now 37-year-old. It's made of small, fabric roses set into little white doilies that are bound together into blooming shapes.
Mackoway says that was the set she made with her mother when she was 16. She now decorates the tree every Dec. 5 – her mother's birthday – and puts the ornaments back on it.
She doesn't remember much about the day they made them, other than the two of them sitting at the dining room table and piecing the decorations together with a glue gun, she says.
Her older brother and sister had already moved out of the family farmhouse, she says, and her father, a trucker, spent many days on the road. That left her at home with her mother, who, she says, "probably tried to keep me entertained."
"I can't even remember if I was excited to help or a 16-year-old dragging my feet, but I do remember it being fun," she says. "It was a special day."
A lifetime of stories
Special memories a-plenty are hung upon Christmas trees across St. Albert, not just in Mackoway's home.
Take the odd collection of Laurel and Frank Vespi. They now have 32 special ornaments on their tree, one for every year they've been married.
Among the collection is a couple of kissing angels, three bunnies in a bag, a Bob Cratchit and a Tiny Tim, and a couple of blue jays with bright, glossy feathers. And each ornament has a story of its own.
The two kissing angels, for example, were bought in 1981, and were their very first ornament. It was the year they got married and moved from Ontario to Alberta, says Laurel.
"It was one of the best Christmases we ever had," she says. "We had a lovely little apartment and there was a fireplace. And we read books and drank wine and tried to wrap our head around exactly how cold it was."
The three bunnies with their heads sticking out of a bag were added to the collection in 1991. That year, Laurel gave birth to twin girls. The third bunny symbolizes the twins' older sister.
Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim remind them of their favourite Christmas movies, while the blue jays were bought the year they started feeding birds in their backyard.
Some ornaments are from vacations, like the Mexican Christmas ball, while others remind them of more local traditions, such as the Ukrainian St. Nicholas figurine.
And then, of course, there's the tacky one – the silver ball with the letters 2000 written across.
"It looks so cliché now," Frank says. "Looking back you think 'couldn't we have found something better?'"
"This was sort of the nicest of the tacky ones," adds Laurel.
The millennium ball is also the only ornament that was chosen ahead of time, she says. Usually they pick them when they come across them at a store, she says.
But they never considered just how many ornaments they would have one day, she adds. And though the girls return every year to decorate the tree, the collection remained strictly the couple's tradition.
"It really is a tradition that we as a couple have, which is probably representative too of what our family life is," she said. "For a long time we very much had the philosophy that a strong family is about a strong couple first."
Strange traditions
Representative of a completely different family tradition is the ornament Cheryl Lundi now keeps on top of her fireplace. There sits a small, black rubber rat, looking out across the living room and her Christmas decorations.
During her teenage years, Lundi says her father supplied her with a collection of what she calls his "creepy crawlers." Every Christmas morning, she pulled out something furry, fuzzy or crawling from her stocking.
But it wasn't until the year he died that the rat arrived, she says.
"He passed away in October 1998 but my mom discovered after he died that he had already purchased my creepy crawler for that year," she said. "So she sent it along from him that Christmas."
From that point on, the rat became a regular fixture on her family tree in her father's honour. A few years later the family dogs got hold of it and she needed to glue it back together. Now the rat is safely transferred each year to his place on top of the fireplace, where he remains part of the family's Christmas traditions and storytelling.
"Dad did a lot of those kind of things," she says. "But he just thought it was the funniest thing and it was neat to have that tradition."
