Nostalgia

Artistic: Nostalgic

Use nostalgic as your inspiration this week. Long for the moments we want recapture. The good times.

Nostalgia – warm fuzzies, bittersweet in nature sometimes, melancholic at others, but always something we miss.

I loved our Christmas Tree when I was little. The brightly coloured lights and chaos of decorations, culminating in Noma the Angel glowing on top, always made me happy. Noma herself is nostalgic beyond belief in our family, being from the 1950s. But I’ll tell you what was on our tree that couldn’t be bought were the decorations my mother made from Milkweed pods and sparkles. Carefully put away at the end of Christmas every year, they were one of my favourites to put on the tree, sparkling and somehow rare as they moved with every bit of air current.

For many of the 15 years I lived in downtown Toronto, I had Milkweed in my garden, mainly to encourage Monarch butterflies, but also because it is so pretty. One year, I decided to make my own milkweed decorations for my tree. Come November, when the butterflies had been and gone, and so had most of the seeds, out came my craft kit, sparkles and all.

In researching for this post, I have found that I might be able to actually get it here for my garden. Certainly it’s damp enough! However, it is not native to the UK and so, these decorations are that much more nostalgic. I’ve tucked them away carefully, wrapped in tissue paper, in a box. Next year, I’ll see them again, and as always, a warm thrill will take me back to childhood, when things were simpler, and mommy and daddy were there, and magic was encapsulated in a Milkweed pod.