I have made it a tradition to create a Christmas ornament for my wife, to commemorate the year and something in our lives. Not content to simply paint the date on a shiny ball and call it done, I employ my model building skills to craft each year's creation.

For 1996, our wedding year, I choose to depict the two of us in a Christmas setting. I had crafted together the figures for our wedding cake, so I didn't want to create a redundant marriage scene. My wife has a short, very sexy red velvet, fur trimmed "Mrs. Claus" suit, so depicting her in it made sense. A street lamp and some lights from a Christmas village helped complete the holiday setting.

For the 1997 ornament I cut apart a die cast metal ambulance to create a 1931 Cadillac hearse, draped in holiday bunting. My wife and I collect hearses...real ones. We even left our wedding in one, light and siren at full tilt.

Macabre reached new levels in 1998 with this holiday banquet scene. Every piece of this holiday endeavor had to be hand built from scratch. The Jim figure is a pit crew mechanic, with hat, apron and glasses sculpted on. His tiny Stryker saw was built from a car suspension part. Amy's figure was a Preiser nude with a Mrs. Claus suit sculpted on. The table, scale, and tube rack are all constructed of sheet styrene. The hand sculpted wine bottle, with HO scale travel poster label, rests in a bed of crushed craft bead ice. The turkey sports a toe tag identifying it as "Gobbler, Tom...Homicide/Stabbing".

After all the hair pulling in 1998, I decided I needed a break in 1999. My wife plays the piano, sax, and accordion, and wears a skimpy "magician's assistant" costume when she's working her booth at Sci-Fi shows. Thus the musical theme to the 1999 ornament. I resculpted the hair on a Phoenix Phollies Tap Dancer to give it the right look for Amy. Some packages, a treble cleft Christmas ornament, and a toy penguin from my childhood, with cane and top hat added, helped flesh out this year's song and dance number.

In October 2000 we flew to Lincoln, Nebraska and purchased a 1975 Oldsmobile high top ambulance to add to our collection, driving the old rig nearly half way across the country to get it home. To commemorate this somewhat bizarre odyssey, I converted a badly battered Dinky Toys ambulance, purchased off of Bay, into 2000's ornament. I sanded and repainted the car, detailing the chrome with Bare Metal Foil, then added holiday wreaths and a bow. Not wishing to repeat the spilling the packages from the hearse ornament, I overstuffed the patient compartment with a Christmas tree instead.

I've had Amy's 2001 ornament planned since the day I finished the first one for her. Fortunately, it required only a small bit of sculpting on a Preiser nude and a toy gorilla from a $2.00 bag of plastic jungle animals to realize this homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of course, only Amy and a few friends got the joke.

In 2002 we purchased a 1957 Seagrave 70th Anniversary Edition Open Cab Pumper to add to our collection, so commemorating the event as a Christmas ornament was pretty much a given. Corgi had released a 1:50 scale die cast truck that was nearly identical to our rig, so finding the right toy truck to convert was easy. The hard part was deciding how to deck the truck for the holidays. I had already filled vehicles with packages and pine trees, and I wanted to do something different. A fire crew of Milliput snowmen, topped off with O-scale helmets, solved my problem nicely.

Amy adores blowfish, and has a prickly collection of blowfish figurines. I decided to cater to my wifešs fascination for inflatable fish with this 2003 ornament. I had intended to build only the santa-capped porcupine fish, to hang as a ball from the tree. With the blowfish nearly completed, I decided that the ornament was too plain, and added the coral Christmas tree decorated with ornamental buttons to fill things out.

Whenever something significant and positive happens in our lives, I try to commemorate that in some way in Amy's Christmas ornament. In 2004 we bought our first home, a remodeled farm house on the edge of Grove City, making the subject of 2004's ornament a fairly easy choice. "Ornament" really isn't the right term to describe this HO scale replica of our home, built completely from scratch using Evergreen patterned sheet styrene and a variety of HO scale windows and doors. The house alone is just over 7 1/2" long, and is better described as a diorama, complete with a sandpaper driveway and many handfuls of artificial snow.