Welcome to day eight of my advent calendar of ornaments. The Cheesy Christmas advent calendar (2020 & 2021) has given way to a tour of our hodge-podge of a Christmas tree – one ornament at a time until Christmas Day.

Today’s ornament is right out of the button jar…

From the Button Jar

If you grew up in the 70s, 80s or earlier, your grandma’s house almost assuredly had one… a button jar that is.

The button jar represented recycling, long before recycling was a thing.

• When you bought a new shirt and they included an extra button “just in case” … it went in the button jar.
• When a shirt wore out or got “decommissioned” the buttons, still perfectly good, were removed and put in the button jar.
• When you purchased a card of buttons for a project and had more than you needed… the extras went in the button jar.

Then, when you were working on a project or needed a quick repair job… you always had spare buttons at the ready. To this day, the sight of a button jar is a happy thing for me.

Today’s ornament came straight out of a button jar.

Before we left Canada, all five of us sat down at the dining room table, during the lead up to Christmas, dumped out a button jar and laid claim to the buttons that we wanted to use. The kids were 8 years younger than they are today and we didn’t tell them exactly what the buttons would be used for, we just told them to pick out the buttons that most caught their eye.

Only after everyone picked out their buttons, did we tell them that we were going to make little button wreaths to hang on the tree (strung onto a thin-gauge wire). We still have five of them on the tree… each one slightly different because of the button-colour & size combinations, the ribbon colour, etc., but those wreaths remind us of a pre-Christmas evening spent together, around the table, at our last home in Canada.

We remember the picture windows, we remember the view out over the field, we remember the light-adorned houses on either side of the field and we remember the decorations between the living and dining rooms.

The location of home changed… but what made it home did not… it’s still “us five”… regardless of the address.

… and that’s today’s Christmas ornament.

Give the gift of Parisian strolls this Christmas.
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