TREE trimming time is here again and families are busy hauling ornament boxes out of attics and closets. Ready for something truly different and unusual, a conversation-stopper that is definitely individualised and reflects your family's personality and lifestyle?Why not consider creating a traveller's Christmas tree, an unusual collections of mementoes purchased on trips around the world. We first suggested this to readers years ago and hopefully some are now enjoying the wonderful memories such a tree provides.

Most family's trees are already a collection of unique memories, ones that have been passed down through many generations.

Perhaps a shiny golden globe that brightened your great grandparents tree a century ago. That treasured winged angel, crowning glory of so many balsams since your parents bought it that first Christmas. Perhaps a handmade school project your mother still insists is worthy of an art gallery. They're all part of your holiday and memories they inspire.

Some vintage beauties have become too valued as antique collectibles and even put on a tree for fear of breakage. Nowadays I'm apprehensive to even handle some of the beauties that I was allowed to attach to limbs — those rare treasures brought by my Baroness Great Grandmother from her family's castle. Absolutely gorgeous.

Happily all survived my years as designated tree decorator and are now safely packed in tissue awaiting display in an antique glass cabinet. Every family has similar treasures, perhaps fading but still glowing with nostalgia.

It's much less worrisome to handle all the miniature hand-woven baskets that now take their place. These are easily accumulated all over the Caribbean, Mexico, South America and Africa in a rainbow of colours.

Miniature baskets have always been used on our trees, a sort of family tradition. One particularly special one first appeared when my grandmother was a young girl. It contained an antique ring passed down through generations. My mother was the next recipient of such a ring in the same basket and so was I — a nice tradition, one you might enjoy.

Life is so much more subdued now tree-wise. The massive floor-to-ceiling beauty that brightened our glass-walled solarium, glittering in tinsel and treasured old ornaments, even antique clip-on candles, is no longer there.

Nor are the two living room trees of normal size in each living room bay window. Those two were decorated with more miniature ornaments like teapots, Santas and small angels.

My father loved going overboard on Christmas, probably because his own holiday celebrations were never the same after losing his own young father when only 11. And after Dad died so suddenly, much too young just before Christmas, we didn't have the heart to carry on as before.

So we did two things — simplified down to one smaller, professionally flocked white tree, snowlike, entirely of unusual travel collected "ornaments never originally intended for such use, and started concentrating on bringing some decorative brightness to other people's holidays.

We'd been brought up since youngsters to take flowers to ailing villagers and sit and visit with them. But now we moved into our holiday cheer phase full force and it's as rewarding to us as it is to recipients.

We present them with a small decorated tree. Homebound or hospitalised because of illness, usually lonely without any close living family, they might not otherwise have any holiday decoration. It's something we started doing more after our father's death when we changed the direction of how we observe Christmas. It just didn't feel the same without him.

Some are made of boxwood, others pine, and are of a size that could sit on a hospital bedside table or be appropriate in a nursing home allowing fresh greens. In some situations small Norfolk Pine are good.

They're decorated with small ornaments purchased everywhere from Mexico and Ecuador to china and Peru. They range from perky small birds and little handmade baskets to petite tea pots and pitchers of alpaca silver along with bring red and green velvet bows and red berries.

Possibilities are only limited by your imagination. You're bringing holiday joy to someone as well as helping third world craftsmen selling these items.

Mexico offers an endless supply — everything from tiny thumb-size pottery flower pots with actual flowers to an endless assortment of pottery thimble size birds and bells easily suspended with a ribbon.

Merchants hoping to sell us a couple are dazed when we clean out their entire inventory. But they're so unique and modestly priced they're too good to pass by. The same was true on my first trip to China in 1981 when boxes of wee glazed porcelain ducks and geese were offered for very modest prices.

You know how much you enjoy looking at assorted collectibles carried home from various trips around the world. Those memories are priceless. The same can be true of your Christmas tree.

There is really no such thing as going too overboard. Yes, that wee hand-sewn deerskin papoose purchased on the Apache Reservation does look appropriate beside the thumb-sized mukluk boots from Goose Bay, Labrador and Laplanders boots of reindeer hide from Finland.

A hand carved wooden drummer boy near them was bought in the lobby of the Hotel Leningrad on my first trip to Russia in 1970. Somehow, he seems much less formal than the uniformed Greek Palace Guard purchased below St. John's Monastery in Patmos.

Where to find these miniatures? They're often buried amid clutter of those "souvenir" collections at dockside booths when your cruise ship arrives anywhere.

Or in shops featuring pin on decorations for children, possibly a shelf of miniatures, key chains, on and on. You'll soon get a trained eye visualising their possibilities.

Ecuador and Peru have them in abundance, flowers and small finger-size figures actually made of baked dough that are brightly painted and reflect traditional dress of their area.

Some ornaments are especially treasured and come from unexpected sources. The several-inch handmade birch bark canoe that came from wonderful family camping trips in Wisconsin's northwoods, discovered in my childhood toy box, is one of them.

An old jewellery box revealed others mouldering away — those valued pins of our youth bought in an Albuquerque five and ten cent store, a pair of cowboy boots dangling from a saddle, a silver cowboy hat meant tobe pinned on one's jacket. They look fun on a tree.

Sisal hemp dolls recall adventures on Brazil's Amazon, and flirtatious flounced skirted senoritas are attractive reminders of Panama. Some of them were handouts in places like Haiti where visitors were always given elaborate little stirrers for their drinks.

Bells are very well represented. You've seen the type all over Switzerland, Austria and Germany — miniature, often painted with edelweiss and hanging from embroidered ribbons.

Whether it's the three inch Alaska totem from that first trip there as youngsters, or the carved lava Hawaii god from Honolulu's Bishop Museum, all seem compatible.

Demure angels from Germany's Obergammergau seem very appropriate beside olive wood carved camels from Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

Dainty handpainted wooden spoon collected in such diverse sites as Turkey, Estonia and Russia are standouts. But were found hiding in souvenir stands crowded with Siberian fur hats, vodka and baklava.

Pottery water jugs duplicate enormous ones used by Tunisians. They're near a Mykonos windmill and Egyptian mummy beads. It's like reliving your travels and taking a geography course at the same time. Everything from Zimbabwe and South Africa to Tibet and New Guinea.

One favourite is treasured for what it represents. Hand-sewn Indian moccasins, probably Sioux, size of two fingers. It stirs up warm memories of visiting Gus and Lizzie as very small children. He was from a family whose mother had been my great grandfather's sister. Much, much older than my father, I now realise he and his brothers were surrogates for my Dad, who'd lost his father so young and never knew his grandfathers, already dead when Dad was born.

Our frequent visits there from babyhood on were like entering a time machine. A lovely house full of wondrous things these very young eyes had never seen, a veritable time machine to another different era.

An elaborate, large glistening silver stove sat in their gracious Victorian "parlour", near a marvellous fainting couch surrounded by other grand old furniture. The piece de resistance was a massive vintage black coal stove in the kitchen, from which we were served elegant dinners.

Very generous donating to charities, they received interesting little thank you gifts. Childless, they delighted in saving them for us, because my father was their great favourite. When we arrived, a large wooden container would mysteriously appear and we'd be invited to search through it and take what we liked. One choice was those Sioux moccasins.

Sadly, such old fashioned personal visits aren't in vogue today. Happily my parents very much enjoyed the company of older people, and knowing them makes me feel connected to much earlier generations and lifestyles.

Modern youngsters miss out on quietly sitting there and hearing their elders reminisce about the past. Perhaps the holiday could be a time to remedy that.

Decorating a traveller's Christmas tree