Holiday Travels

With Thanksgiving only days away, the season of holiday travels is upon us. I hope that your holiday travels are smoother than Steve Martin and John Candy's in the classic Thanksgiving movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. (For fans of the movie, I'd like to pointout that the ChristmasAttic does carry pillows. "Pillows? Those aren't pillows!" Yes, fortunately, they are.) Holiday travel is always a little hectic, but usually worth the result. If it's not, perhaps a Christmas cruise is in order next year?

If you are lucky enough to be where you are going to stay for the holiday, then maybe you could include some foreign destinations in your home decorations:

Italy -- Nativities

Germany -- Handmade wooden angels

The United States -- Nutcrackers handmade in Virginia

Poland -- Blown-glass, hand-painted ornaments

Zimbabwe -- hand-painted tin ornaments

If you have the travel bug, collecting ornaments that represent all the exotic places you have been helps give your tree a personal touch. They also make fun conversation pieces for your holiday parties or dinners. When I was a child, some of theornaments on our family tree I liked most were those we found while traveling. My favorite were clothes-pins painted with bathing suits and snorkeling tubes commemorating our December trip to Jamaica one year.

Travel ornaments are a great way to incorporate places you have lived in your décor. I lived in Paris for a time, as anyone who sees my tree can tell.

I know that visiting Paris is not always feasible -- not that that stops me from bringing it up weekly to my husband -- but moving within the U.S. is common. Glasses, pillows, and dish towels are all inexpensive ways to keep your prior homes and all the memories you have of them part of the present day.

Just as you can bring the places you've traveled home and keep the past part of the present, you can send your friends and family around the country ornaments specific to Washington D.C. to remind them that they are in your thoughts. The most popular is the Official White House Historical Association 201o christmas ornament. Each year the ornament represents a different presidency, and this year it is McKinley's. (Okay, he's not one of the top 10, or 20, but it's still a pretty ornament.) You might also attach a holiday D.C. notecard to a gift you send this year, or tie this Santa-and-Rudolph-on-the-Capitol ornament onto your package's ribbon.