Ornament Discrimination

My mom has this thing with discrimination toward inanimate objects - it especially intensifies at Christmas. She is highly discriminatory toward cookies that are not perfect (I wasn't allowed to eat 'perfect' cookies until I moved out of the house and therefore received them in the mail and thus they were considered a present) and even bread and dried fruit get culled through. However, possibly even more severe is her discrimination towards Christmas ornaments. Now, if her discrimination was based on sentimentality I would understand, but it's totally based on looks. Every year her and Nikole have a battle over where on the tree Nikole's new ornament she made at school will go. In the morning Nikole moves it to front and center, towards the end of the day when my mom sees it she moves it to back and bottom - it's a never ending cycle. She doesn't even like putting the first ornament my dad and her got for their first Christmas on the tree because she says it's ugly. So each year we battled to get the 'ugly' ornaments we knew and loved on the tree before it was full. It actually is quite entertaining. So when she handed my sister and I a bag of ornaments each last year we looked through them spotting some of our favorite ugly ones which she has forever disowned from her box of ornaments. There were a few however that we had never seen before. We determined that apparently these were SO ugly they were not even allowed to see the light of day to be decided as ugly and pushed aside. So, my sister and I vowed to put these on our tree this year in an effort to make them feel a little better about themselves. And thus, I have a ridiculously ugly gold bird hanging on my tree. A gold bird that apparently has been in the box of ornaments for 20 odd years and is just now making his debut onto the Christmas world. So let's hear it for the poor guy - you'd be a little nervous too :)Sadly enough I realized I was doing the same thing this year - and I have maybe been known to force Sandor to eat a few cookies so I didn't have to throw them away but I wouldn't give them to people...oh well, I'll blame it on the genes! :)