Greetings everyone, I am pleased to participate in this beautiful initiative proposed by @homesolutions, entitled: Christmas at Home - New Initiative, and I extend this invitation to my friends @tere.alv, @belkyscabrera and @chacald.dcymt.

Although in my home every year the nativity scene and the Christmas tree are religiously placed, the latter has been for me the most symbolic and emotional decoration since I came into the world. For some reason that I do not remember, my mother's family, the home where I was born and raised, used to place the Christmas tree every year and fill it with many gifts at its foot. There were so many, but so many gifts, that they placed a small table next to it to put more gifts on top of it and even under it they continued to place others. The family was large, we were 6 children and teenagers, several adults, my uncles, my parents and my cousins' grandparents, and those were other times where families gathered to celebrate almost the whole month, and there were family gift exchanges, everyone's godparents brought gifts for the godchild and also for the rest of the children, it was a magical Christmas for the hearts of the children in my home.

In that way, I grew up seeing the tree as a magical source of wonderful wishes, with its lights and symbolic colors that gave our home a truly spiritual atmosphere, I remember spending hours sitting in the living room admiring it.

When my parents divorced and my mom decided that we were going to live alone away from our mother's house, I spent my first Christmas without the presence of a tree in it. That depressed me a lot, because I would go to the family's house sometimes, and I couldn't have the tree permanently. When I was only 10 years old, I remember my younger cousin told me: "Let's put up a tree for you. And he brought some ornaments from his house, garlands and balls, no lights, but more or less what was needed to improvise one, and we took one of my mom's potted plants that was in its pot, and we decorated it with all that and put it in the living room.

It wasn't the most beautiful tree in the world, but it was mine and that was enough. I displayed it with great pride, and today I love the innocence of that little girl. After I grew up and got married, I swore that my children would always have a Christmas tree in the house, and the first one we bought was a medium-sized one, I remember that its branches looked like bottle brushes, hahaha.One day, my children's father showed up at the house with a very big Christmas tree, lights and ornaments, and that's the one I still have. Every year I added ornaments and varied the decoration.

Then it became a tradition to change the decoration of the tree every year, adding something new to it, things I had saved, changing the colors, inventing models and saving that photographic material for the memory. Today I want to share with you some of the ones I liked the most during all these years. I decorated several times with stuffed animals, another time with dolls from the Mc Donalds Happy Meal, last year with the colors of our Venezuelan flag, and even with flowers made with recycled paper.

There have been many decorations of my tree, it is part of my history, and although for me the manger is a sacred symbol of Christmas, the tree is the symbol with which I most identify myself for its magic and what it represents in my life and in my childhood.

Image source:
The images are from my personal gallery
The translator used is: Deepl Translator