I was separated from half of my Christmas decorations for five years or more. They sat in a storage locker with no one coming back for them to make sure they were hung or rung or plugged in or tied in a bow for the holidays.

Maybe someone should write a Christmas story about them, or create a new Rudolph-like cartoon about all the bows and little white lights and Santa napkins that were forgotten. Home Decor Santa could send a sleigh with Martha Stewart riding along to pick up all the Christmas boxes full of decorations that have been left for eternity.

Anyway, this year I made a special effort to retrieve them and unpack them and use them and it was a little trip down memory lane.

The thing about Christmas decorations is that most of us have half an attic full. My husband complains every time we move, or when he has to lug them down the stairs, that we have more “Christmas stuff” than anything else in our lives. I try to explain to him that most of it is garland, which is expensive, and which takes up a lot of space. It’s not like I have 10 boxes of collectible nutcrackers and antique German ornaments carefully wrapped in tissue paper and stored away taking up all that space. And once upon a time we had a bigger house that we’d deck to the nines when the kids were young, so now a quarter of it is goes unused.

I’ve always contended that Christmas is an excellent barometer of where you are in life. You have a plate for Santa’s cookies? You’ve got kids. An Elf On The Shelf? Yeah, kids. Do you have half a basement full of lights and ladders for the outdoor decorations? Kids. Santa cookie jar? Kids.

Sometime after the kids leave, most of us start paring down our ambitious Christmas decorating projects. We go from decorating our houses like a Las Vegas hotel to simple candles in the windows. The Martha Stewart December issue comes in the mail and you don’t even open it. You’re too tired to stand in line at the craft store holding plastic poinsettias, gold glitter and a glue gun anyway.

You could also be my mother, who was down to just one little box of Christmas decorations in her later years. But when I think about those iconic decorations that made Christmas special at my childhood home, I wonder, where did it all go?

My mother’s favorite thing to decorate was the mantle over the fireplace. She had a few handfuls of fluffy fake snow that she used to begin her decorating session, but it may have been made out of some material that has since been banned from the earth. It may have been insulation, but we’ll never know.

On top of the fake, hairy and fluffy snow, she’d create a winter scene on the mantle. The crowning glory was a small sleigh adorned with gold glitter, that sprinkled itself all over the house over three decades, so that each year it looked a little less gold.

My father would play Christmas music on our stereo while we decorated our tree and it amazes me even today that tinsel was a thing for as long as it was. Now, I know a lot of you still love tinsel and that’s fine. But you must admit, it’s really hard to put on well. Every time people walk past it, the tinsel acts as if a fan is blowing it on full blast. By the end of the season, every piece of tinsel is in a tizzy, as if a tornado made its way through the living room two out of the three weeks of the Christmas season.

Once, when I was a teenager, I was sitting on the couch at our home in Buffalo doing homework and I kept hearing something crawling around the tree and making the ornaments wobble. It would stop for a minute and then start again, and when I moved closer to inspect, there was a squirrel staring back at me through the green boughs and the tinsel.

I screamed and he moved further into the tree. And I couldn’t help but think how fortunate the squirrel was to come down our chimney at Christmas, because there just happened to be a big tree there for him to run to–something he knew so well. If he had picked any other time of the year, well, no tree would have made his breaking and entering convenient.

Anyway, I put up every single decoration from every single box I found this year. You’d think I had kids at home again, but I just couldn’t help myself. I missed those things. They make for pretty memories.