sweet.simple.southern. [photography]

i'm a sucker for the traditional.

christmas eve services closing with candles and silent night echoing from the walls of our little country church, spending the last few minutes of christmas day gathered around the piano - mama playing and all of the girls serenading her with carols, decorating the christmas tree with my sister and brother (daddy untangles the hooks and mama is on empty-space duty... ensuring that there aren't huge gaps between ornaments... legit we've got this down to a science), making mounds and assorted cookies with three generations of phenomenal women crowded into our kitchen... it all just seems so magical. 

and it amazes me how these things happen every year, but it never gets old.

i think that's why i love this picture so much, along with all of the feelings it evokes.  i can't remember a christmas when my aunt didn't have this on her tree.  it's so simple.  so beautiful to me. completely timeless... in more ways that one.  

she's frozen.  her unassuming beauty breathtaking.  she has no idea she is adored year after year - previously by a little ballerina and now by a twenty-something young professional who secretly wishes people look at her and see what she sees in this little glass ornament... something that, although simple, is captivating.

and THAT is what i want to capture with photographs. the beautiful simplicity of the ordinary.