In early October, my relatives from Iowa had driven to visit us in East Tennessee. My dad has twin sisters. One has remained here, in the town where they were born, all her life. The other twin has been gone for over 50 years, having married a soldier she first met in a pen pal program while he was fighting in Vietnam. After the war, they moved to his farmland region of Iowa. My husband and I were invited for a reunion dinner, and I made a special request, but not for a menu item. I wanted to look through my grandmother’s Christmas ornaments that, after her death in 1998, my aunts had boxed up indiscriminately with everything in her tiny two-bedroom house and stacked it in storage sheds.

After we ate, my aunt beckoned me to the couch where she had positioned various plastic storage totes. I perched on the edge of the cushion, and she sat on the floor in front of me, opening each storage container and offering up each item inside for my inspection like a home shopping show host. “You are free to take anything you want,” she said. I thought this would be a deeply emotional moment for me. My grandmother was everything to me, and Christmas time at her house was magical with her tree decorated with brightly colored balls and bubble lights plus the delicious treats she made including boiled custard that she stored in a quart mason jar then served cold from the refrigerator on Christmas Day. We visited her house both on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but my favorite was the Christmas Eve gathering. Even though she lived within walking distance, we drove our car packed with presents, the tires crunching up her gravel driveway around 3:00 p.m. each year. As a kid, I watched the clock all day, willing it to move faster, but it crept forward slower than any other day of the year.

We don’t know as children that Christmas will never feel as magical once we are grown or that we will be chasing those feelings for the rest of our lives. Charles Dickens knew. In A Christmas Carol, he wrote, “For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.”

My grandmother loved spoiling me as I was her firstborn grandchild, the only granddaughter, and the only one who lived locally. A hoard of wrapped presents awaited me under the tree— toys, games, Barbies, and clothes. I admit to the disappointment of opening the handmade dresses and pajamas that were part of her gifts, having given an obligatory thanks before pushing the boxes to the side to root around for more desirable presents. That kind of love is lost on us as children, the labor and care that goes into stitching outfits from cutting out the pattern to the final ironing.

But now as I sat with an audience, nothing about the old Christmas decorations were speaking to me. I felt disconnected. But I had asked for this, and it had been a lot of trouble to retrieve them, so I made several stacks of items that my husband then loaded into our car. On the drive home, I confessed my disappointment and bewilderment about not feeling my grandmother’s presence in these items. “Maybe it’s because I’m having an inflammatory flare-up and my neck is so painful… or maybe because I had so many onlookers.” My kind husband replied, “When we get home, I’ll spread everything out on a table downstairs, and when you feel ready, you can spend time alone looking at each item.” What an amazing gift that was to me.

As the semester had been so busy, it was not until the Friday morning after Thanksgiving, still in my pajamas, that I padded down the stairs and headed over to the table, clutching one damp microfiber rag and one dry. Of all the ornaments, it was the antique balls that I most remembered, so that’s where I started, but immediately deflated when the first one was broken.

Holding my breath, I reach again into the Kmart bag and claim a second blue ball. My breath rushes out as a relieved sigh; it is intact. I carefully clean it then hold it up to the light. My four-year-old face used to reflect back at me, now the face is 54 years old, an age my grandmother never knew me. I repeat the process with red, silver, green, and gold balls, 16 in total. No other broken ones.

Next comes a series of Hallmark ornaments with copyright dates from the late 1980s. Each has been meticulously returned to its original box. There are singing raccoons, a reading owl, and other assorted cute miniatures. A few decorative items with greenery and pinecones are not salvageable, and they go into the trash.

The final item I examine is a small red sleigh, constructed from rough wood. My aunt had said that my grandfather made it. He was a talented man with his hands, who could lay brick, wire a house, and do about everything in between. I remember him assembling the swing set in my back yard when I was in kindergarten. Around that time, he also built a wooden rabbit hutch for my white rabbit, unoriginally named Peter Cottontail. My grandfather died of a sudden heart attack when I was in second grade on his last night of work before his retirement. This sleigh is not fine craftsmanship, hastily constructed, but it is staying. I decide that one of my Santa-clad sock monkeys will chauffeur this sleigh, which I place on the shelf inside my front door next to the framed photo of my grandfather in his World War II uniform. It will be the first thing anyone sees.

Later that afternoon, my husband and son are choosing which ornaments they each want to add to the tree as I stand to the side with Mamaw’s humble treasures. I feel tears burning my eyes and wish I could clear the room to be alone, but this is a family tradition. Instead, I wait for a lull in the decorating and approach with the basket of items— a blue ball here, a silver ball to the right, and so on. I move slowly, reverently. I bend toward them again to check my reflection, which reveals the trail of a single tear.

My grandmother had a rich inner life but left little of material value. She owned no handblown glass ornaments from Italy, but I think she would enjoy that one of her cheap colored balls hangs near the glass ball I bought on my trip to Florence. We pass on what we have to give. The 19^th century English poet, Christina Rossetti, penned the words to what would become my favorite carol, In the Bleak Midwinter. In her poem, she asks, “What can I give Him/Poor as I am?” She cites that a shepherd could give a lamb, and that wise men have options. She concludes with the richest treasure— “Yet what I can I give Him/Give my heart.”