THIS POST IS MERELY ORNAMENTAL...

The event I'm now about to relate probably happened around 25-odd years ago.  I came home one evening to find one of a pair of ornaments (above) missing from its accustomed place.  When I asked where it was, my mother said she'd accidentally broken it and it was now in the bin out the back.

I looked in the bin and, wrapped up in a newspaper, were the pieces of the broken ornament.  I took them back inside and set about reuniting them.  I'm quite handy at that sort of thing, and before too long, it was looking much like its old self again, and happily resumed its place alongside its pal.

You can see one ornament on the windowsill,
with the edge of the other just in sight

My earliest memory of these two items is from 1972, and only because they appear in the above photograph, which has the date on the back.  We'd only lived in our (then) new house for around a month, but it's a certainty that we had them in our previous house, and very probably our previous two houses before that.  I'm therefore immensely surprised that I don't consciously remember ever having seen them before mid-1972.

The ornament below I do remember seeing in previous houses, right back to our first one in our new town.  It was likewise one of a pair, but its partner was broken when my brother knocked it off the mantlepiece when he stumbled against it (after a wee shove from me) in the late '60s or start of the '70s.  Sadly, it was beyond my ability to repair back then and there was no way to salvage it.

However, in the late '80s, when my mother broke the lone survivor, I rose to the challenge and restored it, gluing all the pieces together again and repainting the finished item.  One day I hope to find a replacement partner for it in a charity shop or jumble sale and have a pair again.  (In my sentimental madness I sometimes wonder if it ever pines for its missing companion.)

Anyway, I freely confess that I wrote this post more for my benefit than yours, but maybe you can relate to it in some way.  So do you have a long-cherished ornament you'd never part with, or is there one you recall from your childhood that you'd dearly like to own again?  If so, tell us all about it in the comments section.

Here's how the pair would've looked.  I remember them
as being mirror opposites, but I could be mistaken