Discover with me your family tree.
Ignore online apps promising filigree.

Instead, help me decorate my Christmas tree.
String tiny lights round and round with glee.
Stand on tip toe to place Grampa’s ribbon rose
at the very top, where it always goes.

Hang wooden orange giraffe
beside spunky little brown horse.
Decades ago they made you laugh,
hanging above your crib, of course.

Be extra gentle with the pink glass bell,
fragile as a thin egg shell.
Your grandmother’s as a small child,
looking at it, she always smiled.

Add red ornament with letters painted white,
Lillian spelled out, still brings delight.
Made by my teacher in first grade,
her love for students proudly displayed.

Treasure these ornaments year after year
so many belonged to family so dear.
Behold this memory filled Christmas tree,
see and touch your ancestry.

Written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Grace provides us with the last prompt for 2023 as we will now be on hiatus until January 1. She asks us to write a culinary rhyming recipe poem.

While we do indeed have a number of recipes handed down from generation to generation in my family, I’ve taken a bit of poetic license and written a poem with a “recipe” for my adult children (now 47 and 49; I’m 76) to discover their ancestry/family tree by looking at the ornaments on my Christmas tree. Just a few are mentioned in the poem. There many more including a fragile airplane that was on my father’s tree when he was a little boy. You can see it in the photo, next to my mother’s pink bell. There are ornaments made by my children’s babysitters; two painted by my father; some made by neighbors from the house where we raised our children; some made or given to us by aunts and uncles; sadly some given to us by relatives now gone from this earth. There are ornaments made by our kids when they were 4 and some when they were in grade school. There are ornaments collected from family vacations. It is what I often call a memory tree. Almost every ornament has its own story. In a way, they are the ingredients, melded together and on display, that enable us to reconnect with our family every year, no matter the distance or time that separates us; no matter if they have left this earth and only reside in our hearts.

Whatever holidays you celebrate, I hope they are joyful and shared with loved ones. I also wish everyone a happy and healthy New Year.