Tuesday Traditions - Dated Tree Slivers

This is one of my favorites!

We go the fresh tree route and we’ve started saving a ”slice” of the tree each year.

We have one from every tree since our first Christmas with babies - when our twins were just 5 months old in December 2008.

Aside from just being something special we do every year that help us anticipate and connect to the season, the dearest traditions fill us with that sense of belonging. They make us feel like “this is a story I know, this is a story that I’m a part of, this is a story I love and cherish.”

That’s what these little tree slivers mean to us. A little piece of each year that we can still touch, that we can turn over in our hands and let our hearts take us back in time. A little piece of yesterday that reminds us how fast it’s all moving and to treasure the very moment of today that we’re standing within.

There’s 2008 when my husband and I each strapped a baby into a carrier on our chest, bundled them up against the cold, and took our infant twins out to get our first family Christmas tree - blinking away the exhaustion that clung in our eyes.

There’s 2011 when we just started to share the news that we were expecting our third, and if you look carefully at the photos from the tree farm that day, you’d see the beginnings of a bump peaking from beneath my winter coat.

There’s 2015, when our fourth baby was brand new - things felt totally overwhelming and perfectly content somehow at the same time.

There’s 2020 when we were separated from our extended families because of the pandemic and we relied even more on the twinkle from that tree.

There’s 2022… cut just after Thanksgiving and I‘ll always laugh and remember how EACH of the kids needed to cut their own special piece of the tree this year.

And all the years between and still to come.

Just one of those traditions that whispers “you belong,” …. and I love it.