As part of a family tradition, the author receives a Christmas ornament, opened every year on Christmas Eve, from her mother. When examined as a collection, the evolution of Christmas ornaments can be traced, including the emergence of non-Christmas, commercially recognizable characters—a symptom of the continued commodification of childhood (Hade, 2001). The collection of ornaments represents more than a timeline of the cross-marketing of media and Christmas and an increasing sophistication in the structure of the objects themselves. As Pahl & Rowsell suggest in Artifactual Literacies (2010), these ornaments represent a narrative history of the relationship between the author and her mother, retold annually. The objects themselves represent moments in time, contextually situated and unique to the author—memories that are accessed and shared with the decorating of the Christmas tree each winter. This ethnographic piece approaches the examination of a collection of Christmas ornaments as memory work (Mitchell & Reid-Walsh, 2002). The stories and sentiments attached to each ornament, by both the author and her mother, and the contexts in which the ornaments are situated, provide a narrative history of the author’s childhood and her relationship with her mother—a narrative history that transcends the commodification of childhood represented in the increasingly commercial quality of the ornaments.
About the presenterLaura Ann D'Aveta
I am currently a Children’s Literature PhD candidate at Penn State (ABD). My research interests include young adult science fiction and fantasy, place, and the interaction between readers and fictional settings.