Letters and symbols, icons and shorthand. We use them to convey meaning, experience, fact and story to create a reference.  Weave several together, and you have history.  We’ve created these continually throughout time, and have become so prolific at it that most of us have begun to filter out these symbols habitually.  We don’t bother to slow down to read signs.  We delete pop-up messages and junk mail.  We are inundated and overwhelmed with letters all day long and hardly think about them.  What if we focused in on one letter, one symbol, and let it represent an entire text, like the medieval scribes did with illuminated manuscripts?  This illuminated letter represents my daughter Rebecca’s first Christmas in 1989.  What kind of a history does this describe?  That there once was a mother who commemorated her child’s first Christmas by making a special ornament.  She decorated a tree with it every year for 20 years.  The child grew up, her father died, and she moved away from home.  The mother stopped celebrating Christmas, but she gave her daughter the special ornament to keep.  Soon the daughter had her own house and her own Christmas tree.  She decorated the tree and invited her mother to come celebrate with her.  Her mother was pleased to see the ornament hanging in just the right place, so she took a picture of it.  The End.