David grew up making homemade ornaments for the family Christmas tree.  When he was in the US Air Force, he wanted to decorate his dorm room and wanted homemade ornaments to decorate his Christmas tree.  I made ornaments for him and the two of us were painting the ornaments when he asked me to make ornaments with him for the rest of my life.  Our engagement anniversary is Saturday, so I wanted to post this close to that date.

Making ornaments has been our own family tradition.  We took a small portion of them with us to France and then onto Cameroon.  Unfortunately we found out the hard way that our homemade clay doesn’t hold up in a tropical environment.  I was so sad when we had to throw away all our homemade clay ornaments we took, the ones we made in France and the ones we made our first year in Cameroon.  The tropical, humid environment made them soggy and mold.  I had to be creative when choosing homemade ornaments to make from that Christmas forward in Cameroon – I chose wood and foam.  We write or paint the year on the back of each ornament.

This year we can make homemade clay ornaments again!

This was one of David’s ornaments from childhood.

This was given to DeAnna from her Sunday School teacher’s in 1981.