If someone wanted to learn more about a family, studying their Christmas tree and its decorations would be a good place to start.

Our family's Christmas tree reveals a great deal about our lives.

In the beginning, when the children were first born, our Christmas trees were always very modest. Strung with popped corn and strands of lights, the trees had very few ornaments; those my husband and I had received as wedding gifts - we were married Dec. 27 - and hand-me-downs from our parents.

One telltale sign of those early trees, though, was how we clustered the ornaments at the top of the tree. Only a few of the sturdy ornaments decorated the lower half, placed there by tiny hands that had not yet learned to grasp a delicate object.

As the children got older and the more fragile ornaments were moved downward, we showed the kids how to blow on the ornaments to make them move, one way of allowing them to enjoy the tree without touching it.

When the children grew older still, cutting a tree from a nearby farm became a family tradition. With our two older boys selecting them, the trees got bigger and bigger.

Even though we have a cathedral ceiling in the living room, my husband often had to trim branches from the trees to make them fit and run guy wires from their trunks to the wall to keep them upright.

The old tree stand, its legs broken by the stump of a giant pine, was replaced by a gravel-filled, 5-gallon bucket.

Decorating those bigger trees wasn't a problem, though, as our three children made ornaments in school each year. The children are older now, but this year's tree still holds their handmade decorations: construction paper globes, pipe-cleaner candy canes, and school pictures framed in glittery snowflakes and crooked yellow stars.

In more recent years, the size of our trees have again become more modest, probably because both boys are away from home now and our 15-year-old daughter, who gets to select the tree, is more interested in shape and color than size.

This year's tree, housed again in a store-bought tree stand, stands beautifully in our living room, wreathed in popcorn strung by my daughter and me and glittering with countless ornaments.

In addition to the school-made ornaments, there is a glass bulb that once hung from a tree when I was a child; a miniature Scotty trailer, the kind our family used for camping; replicas of a Checker cab, John Deere tractor and Crescent wrench, reminders of my husband's work and hobbies; the once-popular Miss Piggy, given to me by my college roommate; and a ceramic Santa from my mother, who, following a severe stroke last year, can no longer share in the joy of our Christmas.

One ornament hangs from a piece of yellow electrical wire, given to me by my husband almost a decade ago. It is of made of two Popsicle sticks, shaped into a cross, and held together by a tiny bolt. Faced with an illness that would change his life forever, he said the ornament was a reminder of the cross we would bear together.

Oh, what stories our Christmas trees can tell.