When I was growing up in Oklahoma, we always had a lighted star, and everyone else I knew well enough to see their trees seemed to have stars. My mother collected angels with lyres and when I was a younger adult, I gave her one made to be a tree-topper: porcelain head and hands, dark long hair, robes of silky fabric. Since I left home (in California, Iceland, and the past decades Connecticut), I have always had an angel, of various types, but since my mother died it has been her angel.