Christmas Stroll Down Memory Lane
“You can put anything on a tree,” artist Lyn McAden Roberts said, her slender fingers rustling an old handwritten note.
Written in blue, large and curled letters, the card turned Christmas ornament began, ‘Dear Ant [sic] Lyn …’
Other than a couple of clumsy signatures, there wasn’t anything else written on the folded piece of paper, but for Lyn it brings back memories of when her now grown niece and nephew were “just little.”
“If you have things like that, you keep them,” she said.
From a lone star hanging from the ceiling in her kitchen to the thousands of ornaments and holiday-themed decorations that charmingly freckle her Preston Hollow home, Christmas is like a walk down memory lane in the Roberts’ house.
There’s the hand-painted glass Christopher Radko ornaments her friend Sherry Doran gave before dying from brain cancer; the entire silver ball collection her late friends Bud Knight and Chet Flake gifted her; the felt stocking her mother stitched and decorated with keepsakes like Lyn’s baby bracelet and Girl Scout badges; and, of course, the dark-haired boy angel that still reminds her that being the oldest child isn’t always fair.
“It used to have two blonde little girls with it,” she said, “but my mom gave those to my younger sisters and told me to get over it because I was the oldest.”
She laughs, now.
And while it’s hard for Lyn to pick her favorite decoration, at the top of the list is somewhat of a stick figure tree adorned with hollowed eggs draped in luxe fabrics – all one-of-a-kind and decorated by her second cousin while living in New York City.
Well that and a bed dressed for the holidays.
“Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night,” she crooned while reading the words a friend hand-stamped across the fringe of the top sheet.
