With each Christmas season, the trees that come with it get continuously more uniform and lackluster. It’s simply tradition to pick out a pine tree from a farm or set up the fake one stored in the garage every year and decorate it with an assortment of ornaments, lights, tinsel and whatever else there’s room for. 

However, people have begun to get lazy; they go to Target and get a 50 pack of the same color ornaments and call it a day. Am I saying these trees decorated with prepackaged kits are ugly? No. But they lack the character that one needs to make Christmas feel like Christmas. How does one feel the Christmas spirit when every single decoration blends in with one another, and probably matches with a thousand other trees? 

Thus, it’s only proper to use ugly ornaments. In my family, we have been building a collection of ornaments since before I was born. Each year, we each pick out an individual ornament that we want to add to the tree, meaning we have a lot of ornaments (emphasis on a lot). Handmade, glass, plastic, foam, custom made, ones that light up, broken, big, small, pretty and ugly ornaments; we have it all.

The best part of having all of these ornaments? I forget about them every year until the moment they’re being put on the tree. It’s almost a sort of Christmas time capsule, revealing memories and moments from previous years. I even have the ornament my parents bought for me for my first Christmas, 16 years ago! Although I wish I could throw away some of the ornaments, specifically the ones with my picture on them, my entire life is reflected in those ornaments. It never fails to make me feel nostalgic while putting up the tree. 

As children get older and families grow apart, it’s nice to have something to bring everyone together for once a year. The holidays tend to lose some of that magic they once had as a kid, so finding that Christmas spirit through an ugly ornament collection and a family tree-decorating session is one way to breathe life back into the season. Christmas time is all about family, so the trees should be an expression of that same value and not just an item to make the house look better. So, next time a department store or a social media influencer tries to fool their customers into buying an ornament multi-pack, I hope they begin to see how much more spirited an ugly Christmas tree is.