This is our 24th Christmas together. Every year 2 special ornaments have been front and center on our tree. The boys are tired of hearing the story every year as we decorate the tree. Here it is for the rest of the world:
For those not familiar with our story, we married while I was still a student. I had been working my way through college but senior year as a Chemistry/Chem E major was going to be full of labs and lots of classes that would make working difficult. Peggy agreed to quit school and work 2 jobs to pay for me to finish my degree. Needless to say money was extremely tight. We decided to not put up a tree that year due to cost, then the night of Dec 23rd we were at A&P buying groceries because Peggy had just been paid and they had trees marked down to $3. Only scruffy "Charley Brown" trees were left by that time, but we bought one anyway. We put the groceries in the 1970 VW Beetle we drove then discovered we had no way to secure the tree to the car. Our apartment was 4 blocks away, so we decided to walk the tree home, she on the top and me on the heavy bottom end. We laughed the whole way, then pondered how we would stand the tree up. We finally came up with a flower pot we stood the tree up in then packed gravel from the parking lot around the bottom of the tree to hold it up. So there we had a naked tree but a tree none the less. Then we remembered our groceries in the VW still in the A&P parking lot so we walked back hand in hand to retrieve them.
Christmas Eve she worked the morning in the fabric store, then early afternoon I took her lunch before taking her to the 2nd job waiting tables. There was a Big Lots closeout store next to the fabric store, and Peggy suggested we go in and look for some decorations. She had gathered up about $8 worth of change from tips. We went in and bought a few glass balls and 3 collections- one glass, one funny blue painted wood ornaments, and one brass tin-punched.
After I picked her up from the steak house when they closed 9:00 Christmas Eve we went home to decorate the tree. 2 ornaments stood out for us. The glass Love Birds is kind of obvious why it means a lot to us. It's cliche', but we were pretty much living on love at that time.
The other was a funny little bird sitting in front of his house with his mouth wide open. I don;t know why but it really tickled me. "Reckon what he's shouting" I asked.
Putting her arms around me she said "He's telling the world how much I love you and wants to make sure they hear"
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