My favorite parts of celebrating the holiday season all involve the originally pagan rites like the mistletoe, the yule log, exchanging gifts and, of course, the Christmas tree. We got our tree last night and decorated it this morning. My mother was somewhat obsessed with Christmas, and did a completely different tree theme every year, often making all the ornaments herself. She’d also buy a few ornaments every year and add them to a box for me and, when she passed away in 1981, I inherited all of the ornaments. I’ve continued the tradition of buying new ornaments every year, though I don’t have a whole new tree each year. Instead, the family looks through the boxes and boxes of ornaments and we choose the ones that catch our fancy each year to create our decorated tree. Many of the ornaments reflect our passions, so Porter has train ornaments and Alice has princesses. Over the years I’ve amassed ornaments of some of my peculiar fetishes, such as globes, clothespins, snowmen, birds, potatoes, bowling pins, the Packers and, of course, beer. So this morning I took a photo of each of my beer ornaments, which are presented below in he slideshow. Hoppy Christmas.

Below is a slideshow of my beer-themed Christmas ornaments. This Flickr gallery is best viewed in full screen. To view it that way, after clicking on the arrow in the center to start the slideshow, click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, to see the photos in glorious full screen. Once in full screen slideshow mode, click on “Show Info” to identify each photo.