An autobiographical essay I wrote in October, 1999, detailing the demise of my favorite Christmas ornament. It aired on the NPR-distributed Christmas program A Change of Season.

This essay is really meant to be listened to, rather than read. Here is a link to an MP3 of the essay.

You'd think that after living through thirty-three Christmases, I'd have the whole thing figured out by now. But I didn't really understand the meaning of Christmas until the Christmas Chicken died.

When I was growing up, most of our Christmas ornaments were hand-made by my family, or given to us as gifts. Some were pewter or etched-glass Christmas scenes. Most were the school-made artistic creations of my brother and mine: God-awful collages made from tongue depressors, crayon, glitter, and paste. Decorations only a parent could truly appreciate. They were more than just ornaments - they were the vessels of Christmas memories.

Every Christmas, my family parades around the decorated tree, pointing out favorite ornaments; spinning stories about Christmases past; dredging up memories of friends and relatives - of growing up and growing old. Our Christmas tree documents my family's history. Making new decorations was its own celebration in my family. Each of us had a favorite type of ornament. My mother - who loved stuffed cloth icons, diligently stitched fabric Santa Clauses - the entire cast and crew of the Nativity - and Christmas stockings by the dozens. My father, on the other hand, enjoyed ornate monstrosities made of skewers of brightly colored beads strung on long pins and inserted into shaped pieces of styrofoam. My brother and I leaned toward roughly hewn works of art squeezed from mounds of dough and often completely lacking any holiday theme.

My brother's most infamous sculpture was a jelly doughnut - he made when he was about six years old. It was slathered with white paint, and had a huge red indentation on one side, to indicate where the jelly lay hidden. This masterpiece had just one flaw: its authentic size and girth resulted in a two-pound mass of solid dough. Only a strong branch way inside the tree could handle the load.

I made my best work of Christmas art in 1970, when I was four. As usual, my mother mixed the flour, salt, and water, and asked me what I wanted to make for the Christmas tree. I clanged my way through a box of cookie cutters and pulled out a metal tool that loosely resembled a rooster. "A chicken," I exclaimed, "I want to make a Christmas Chicken." My mother obliged Ð she rolled out the dough and helped me cut out the Christmas Chicken. I rejected paint for my creation, deciding that texture was the preferred design element: I stabbed that poor creature about seventy times with a toothpick. My mother smiled with pride, pressed a metal ornament hook into the Christmas Chicken's back, and set it out to dry. Later she wrote my initials and the year on its back in magic marker. Ever since that day, our family Christmas celebrations included the story of a small boy making a Christmas Chicken.

As far back as I can remember, my mother promised to present a box of ornaments to my brother and me when we had families of our own. She hoped we would share our family Christmas stories with our children. She still holds my brotherÕs ornaments. He is fairly estranged from our family now, and it's been 8 years since he returned home for Christmas. But each December my mother faithfully places the jelly doughnut on a sturdy branch; she keeps his Christmas memories close to her heart until he is ready to claim them as his own again.

Shortly after I married, my mother presented me with an old shoebox that was filled with the Christmas memories embodied in my annual creations. The few Christmas trees that marked my married life always contained the Christmas Chicken. After my wife and I separated, I stored that shoebox of memories in the basement. I didn't decorate much during those years, preferring to relegate Christmas to some other lifetime.

But last year was different: I decided to decorate a Christmas tree again. Up from the basement came the weathered Christmas shoebox. I sorted through decorations, pausing to let memories rush at me like warm water - lingering over each with the sweet freshness of the once forgotten, now familiar. As I hung those ornaments on my tree, I told their stories to my empty living room. There was the hammered brass disc given to me by a friend in Montana. A crushed paper star, made in grade school, was still bound together with mounds of glue and glitter. There were even a few of my mother's Christmas Santas. As I neared the bottom of the box, I scrabbled harder for the Christmas Chicken.

Its remains lay crumbled in a corner of the shoebox. Dampness had slowly attacked the Christmas Chicken during the years I ignored it and left it to sit unprotected in my basement. The Christmas Chicken was dead. Broken into four or five small pieces and surrounded by a pile of flour, salt dust, and a rusted metal hook.

What had I done? While I worked to safeguard myself from recent memories, I had allowed the oldest and dearest ones to fade away. I let them disintegrate into piles of unrecognizable pieces. I felt unworthy: an unfit keeper of precious memories that had been protected by my mother and callously disregarded by me. In that moment, I realized how alienated I had become from the innocence of my youth - that precious time when Christmas was simple and exclusively full of surprise and joy.

I bolted to the basement and began tearing through other dusty U-Haul boxes filled with mementos of my childhood. Stacks of old report cards - drawings of cars and airplanes - a prize-winning essay from the seventh grade. It was as if I stood in the middle of a burning house, rushing to save memories before they fell victim to the flames of neglect.

Part way through one box, I found a cassette tape marked, "Eric Sings - December 1970" - recorded around the same time I had created the Christmas Chicken.

Cassette tapes for my grandmother in New Jersey were another of my mother's ideas. She taped the sounds of grandchildren so they wouldn't seem so far away. I listened, overwhelmed by crisp memories: the beauty of my mother's laugh, a child's misinterpretations of Christmas lyrics, and the sounds of my brother - then ten months old - cooing with excitement at his first Christmas - years before he would encounter the demons that follow him through his life.

I sat on my couch, listening to the tape and holding the remainder of the Christmas Chicken tight in my hand. I guess I hoped that the strength of my memories and the depth of my sorrow would somehow heal the Christmas Chicken. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to open my hand and find it restored - the way I remembered it a lifetime earlier.

A few days later, I finished decorating my tree. I even added a few new ornaments - hoping to create a new batch of Christmas memories to make up for the ones lost to carelessness, neglect, and fear.

For the past year, I've debated the final fate of the Christmas Chicken. It sits in a Ziploc baggie in my desk drawer, waiting for some kind of appropriate memorial - or new use - or something. As this Christmas approaches, I think I'll let it rest awhile longer. It has morphed into something else: a symbol of the importance of tradition and memory. I know that Christmas traditions are not embodied in a piece of dough.

The memories of the Christmas Chicken live inside me.