Ornaments make good souvenirs

Keep the memories without excess clutter

It’s a pretty common urge: when we travel somewhere, we want to take home some item to remember the trip. We tell ourselves we’ll look back on the object and recall all the wonderful things that happened.

And maybe we will, but a lot of souvenirs are really tacky, and tend to become clutter. How many of us truly want to look regularly at, say, a small Eiffel Tower, or a miniature Space Needle from Seattle, or a pair of wooden shoes from the Netherlands?

We usually don’t look at random collections of small objects…except at Christmas. During the holidays, many of us pull dozens of random items out of boxes and put them on our trees, recalling memories as we do.

So there’s a simple way to make the souvenir-buying impulse useful: buy ornaments as souvenirs.

A small Eiffel Tower on a Christmas tree is kind of fun. So is a miniature New York City taxi cab. A model phone booth from London can go right next to a wooden moose from Maine.

Most of these things would just gather dust the rest of the year, but for a few weeks they can be part of the decor. When you pull each ornament out of the box, you can recall your trip to the destination and then, just as magically, put them all back away in January. It’s a win all around.