When I was a little girl, my siblings and I always had our own special ornaments to hang on the Christmas tree.

Some were from the years we were born, engraved with our names. We had a rule that you couldn’t hang up someone else’s ornament – it was just wrong.

And so every year, I hung that little metal angel with “Erin 1979” on the tree. It felt a little bit special because Erin wasn’t a popular name at the time, and I wasn’t going to be one of those kids who...