Sometime around 1945, Mayme Schoonover bought her first Christmas ball kit.

She was shopping with a friend a few days after the Christmas holiday that year and she spotted deeply discounted kits for making the ornaments. She decided she’d take some home.

Over the next year, whenever she had time, Schoonover would pull out the kits and within minutes turn those plain balls into works of pearly art. Then, the next Christmas, she gave them away as hostess gifts. She did this year after year.

Eventually, Schoonover started keeping a few for herself, saving them for her own Christmas tree.

She figures she’s made thousands of Christmas balls over the years —- some for herself, some for relatives and friends. Some she designed; others she copied from photographs she came across in magazines.

She loved making those ornaments as much as she loved Christmas, affection she inherited from her father while growing up in Arlington, Texas.

“We all caught the bug from him,” Schoonover said the other day.

Her earliest memory of Christmases past is of her family decorating the tree a week before the big day with ornaments they had bought. On rare occasions, they strung popcorn garland to finish it off. The rest of the time, she and her two older sisters tried to guess what was inside the boxes underneath.

“It was always a fun time,” she said.

Fun times and huge peppermint sticks, the one gift Schoonover said she could always count on from her father that made every Christmas special.

But she soon outgrew peppermint sticks.

In 1938, she graduated from high school. After spending two years at the University of Texas at Arlington, she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in home economics from the University of Texas at Austin.

She was there when she bought her first Christmas ball kit. Later, when she couldn’t find kits at department store sales, she bought them at craft shops.

“I got to where I’d look everywhere I’d go for Christmas ball kits,” she said.

Even after she married Carroll Schoonover in 1968, her search continued. And even though her father died when she was nearing her 38th birthday and she and Carroll never had children, there was never a time like Christmas morning.

A lifetime later, on another Christmas eve, Schoonover is still in love with Christmas.

She hasn’t bought a Christmas ball kit in a long, long time, but she still makes those pearly ornaments and still decorates trees for others to enjoy.

Listening to her talk about the time she shared with her family —- the traditional Southern meal of turkey and dressing, green beans and ambrosia that her mother cooked —- it’s hard to fathom what Christmas in these hard economic times will be like for most families and their children.

Will there be a Christmas tree?

You get the feeling talking to Schoonover and the people at the Lenbrook continuing care retirement community, where she now lives, that she started thinking about a Christmas tree shortly after she moved in four years ago. It was August, but she wanted to know then if she could decorate the Christmas tree.

It would have been easy for her to make her ornaments and hang them from a tree in her apartment for her own pleasure, to keep her gift to herself.

But she didn’t.

She let all of Lenbrook enjoy the beauty of those ornaments and so the spirit of Christmas, said Debbie Taylor, Lenbrook’s president and chief operating officer.

“Bottom line is, she shared,” said Taylor.

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