24 Days of Ornaments – 10

Welcome to day ten of my advent calendar of ornaments. Cheesy Christmas (2020 & 2021) is out, and instead I’m giving you a tour of our hodge-podge of a Christmas tree – one ornament at a time until Christmas Day.

Today’s ornament takes us to the heart of the Italian Alps…

The Year was 2015…

… and it was our first year in France. We had arrived in January 2015 and imagining – as we did back then – that France was a temporary thing… we took advantage of a timeshare purchase that we’d made several years earlier, to spend a week at a property near Pisa Italy.

We spent a day crossing France via national roads and spent the night in Chamonix, at the foot of Mont Blanc. The next morning we took the Mont Blanc tunnel (+ 114 other tunnels) and arrived in Pisa later that afternoon. It was a lovely week, after which we came back the way we went.

On the way back, however, rather than immediately crossing the Mont Blanc tunnel back into France, we opted for a bit of a break, to stretch our legs, in the tiny Italian mountain town of Courmayeur. That’s where today’s ornament came from…

If you think back to the first ornament I showed you, you’ll be able to guess one of the reasons why I love these little alpine-painted, wooden ornaments… it’s their simplicity… they’re wooden.

Once again, there’s not a lot of bling. First and foremost, it’s the material… it harkens back to something that one could make with only minimal skills & tools – not all that difficult. The design, too, is simple… simply a semi-transparent red paint / stain, with a white, snowflake-like design. Even the fact that it’s hung by a bit of regular garden twine through an eye-hook is appealing to me. (not to mention… it’s also a heart-shape which fits into that loosely assembled “theme”.)

Over and above the rest, it speaks of winter and it evokes fond family memories of a late-afternoon stroll through a tiny, Italian, mountain village and a funicular trip up Mont Blanc.

… and that’s today’s Christmas ornament.