The Last of the Christmas Ornaments

Welcome to the first TGIFF party of 2026! Did you stay up to celebrate the arrival of the new year, or did you go to bed early? We usually head to bed around 10:00, but we made the effort to stay up with Nathan and Zachary last night. We're definitely not party animals - our New Year's Eve tradition for probably the past 10 years has been to watch a movie together, timed so that it ends just before midnight. Then we wish each other a happy new year and go to bed 😆 Last night's movie was Wake Up Dead Man, (Knives Out 3). It was an easy choice, since we watched the previous two as New Year's Eve movies as well.

I have a small finish to share today, but it feels like a big one. In 2002 I decided to make an ornament to celebrate Aiden's first Christmas, with the intention that I'd make him an ornament every year until he graduated high school. When Zachary was born in 2004, I increased it to making two ornaments every year, and in 2008, I added Nathan's ornaments. The ornaments are not at all Christmas themed, instead they reflect something from their year. That means my Christmas tree is full of odd things like a frog (Zach's favourite animal that year)...

A drum set (for when Aiden started drumming)...

 Three vans (for the years they got their driver's licenses)...

This recreation of a sign Nathan made the summer he spent drawing pictures and selling them by the side of the road (it was a very successful venture!)

And so much more. What would be on the ornament was always a surprise, and coming up with something for each of them, and finding a pattern for it, was part of the fun for me. Most of the ornaments are cross-stitched, but there are a handful that are embroidered because there was no cross-stitch pattern to be found.

In 2018, I wrote a tutorial showing how I made all of these into ornaments, using the snowflake on red fabric in the picture above. It's the same process whether the ornament had been stitched on cross-stitch fabric or quilting fabric.

Aiden graduated in 2020, then Zach graduated in 2022, so I haven't been making them ornaments for a few years. Now Nathan will graduate this spring. I made Aiden and Zach an ornament with a graduation cap that I gave them on graduation day, so Nathan will still get one more ornament to complete his collection, but this was the last Christmas I made one that was a surprise hung on the tree for him to find.

I figured he knew what his ornament would represent, even if he didn't know what the design would be, but he says he wasn't sure what it would be. To me, this was the obvious choice, making it one of the easiest years to decide what to make.

In the fall of 2024, he came home from school one day saying there was a contest for a trip for students to go to France to visit WW1 sites, and he wanted to go. He spent that Christmas break writing an essay about a WW1 soldier as his entry, sent it off in January, then waited and waited. He was crushed when a classmate found out she had been accepted and he still hadn't heard anything. Then a couple of days later, he got a call saying he had been selected, too! 

The trip is an annual thing, sponsored by the Newfoundland government, and last summer they took 99 students from the province to France and Belgium, all expenses paid. They visited the 5 caribou statues that commemorate significant battles for the Newfoundland regiment, along with several other sites including Vimy Ridge, holding remembrance ceremonies at each site.

Nathan and his classmate both absolutely loved the trip, of course! Nathan was amazed by the architecture in Europe, sending me pictures of everything from stained glass windows, to stone walls, to cathedrals. His classmate declared she's going to learn Flemish and move to Bruges after she graduates 😆 It was the trip of a lifetime, for sure!

For his ornament, I thought about finding a cross-stitch pattern for the Eiffel Tower, but decided against that. Though they did spend a little time in Paris, and did visit the Eiffel Tower, that really wasn't the focus of the trip. Instead, I had Paul scan the logo on one of Nathan's shirts from the trip, then I traced that onto fabric and embroidered it with Aurifil 12 wt thread. I'm really pleased with how it turned out!

I was ready to stitch the front and back pieces together when I realized I hadn't added the year to the ornament! I'm so glad I realized that before I finished assembling it! Since the pieces were already cut, I didn't have room to stitch it onto the front, so I stitched in on the back instead. 

Though there will be one more ornament in May, this still feels like the last one in a lot of ways. I find it hard to believe I'm at the end of a Christmas project that spanned 23 years!

So that's my finish for this week's party; what is yours? Do you have a Christmas present you can now share? Whatever you've finished lately, link it up below and then visit some of the other links to celebrate their finishes, too.

We're always looking for hosts for the TGIFF party, so if you'd like to join our hosting community, go here to sign up!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter