Christmas Eggs

You may have noticed in my header picture our baby Emily, who is now 25 years old, is holding in her hand an egg.  And there are a couple more hanging on the tree around her.  Our Christmas egg tradition started in 1978 when our last two kids hadn't been born yet.  I saw an article in a woman's craft magazine on making decorations out of real eggs.  That really appealed to me so I spent a lot of time that winter making egg decorations, which involved blowing the yolk and white out through a small hole poked in the pointy end of the egg, drying it out, putting two coats of paint on them, cutting out and glueing tiny wrapping paper motifs on the painted eggs, and finishing with two coats of decoupage medium, a cap finding and thread for hanging.  Quite a long process, but well worth the effort.  I put a child's name and the year on lots of the eggs.  This continued for several years until all six older kids had several eggs with their names and dates on them.  I stopped doing it for awhile, and then six years later Emily was born so she needed to have her own name egg too so I did a few more in 1986.  And that was it.  We had so many pretty decorated eggs that one year they were the only decorations on our tree, except for lights and garland, of course.  That year was also the year a friend's child crawled behind the tree and knocked it down - not one egg was broken!

As the kids grew up and left home, they each took with them some of the eggs, especially the ones with their own name on them.  I always like to go visit their homes at Christmas and find their special egg on their tree.  Seeing the 1978 or 1979 date on them really gives a feeling of passage of time.  This year I decided that it's only fair that the kids' spouses and children have their own egg ornament so I got busy and started blowing eggs - lots of scrambled eggs, omelettes, french toast, etc. so that the insides of the eggs wouldn't be wasted.  I had forgotten in my excitement to make the egg ornaments that family multiplication over the years made it necessary for me to make 34 eggs - one each for each of my 7 kids, 7 more for their spouses, and 20 for the grandchildren. 

This year I was more adventurous and rather than limit myself to wrapping paper motifs, I raided my scrapbooking stash and used paper from there as well as ribbons, beads and lots of bling.

Here's a few of the finished results:

Decorations in progress

Just bling on Jenny's egg this year

The youngest member of the family gets a suitably appropriate one.

This was my first try at an all-bling egg for granddaughter Kenzie

See how pretty they look on the tree.  I had to take them off again of course so they could be given to the new owners.

And a few more on the tree.

I had tried to post more pictures of the eggs, but Blogger wasn't cooperating with me today.  I hope these eggs are part of my kids' Christmasses long after I'm gone.