Recently, I did some shopping at the Dollar Tree in Danville Plaza II on Mount Cross Road across from Walmart. While standing in the checkout line, I watched as the cashier rang up the purchases of several customers in front of me. These “Dollar Tree treasures” were of a Christmas Season nature; plastic branches and leaves painted in red, green, silver, gold, orange, and yellow, coated with matching, glue-fastened glitter.

I assumed this customer was dissatisfied with factory-made Christmas wreaths and had decided to make one of her own.

The cashier rang up the lady’s items, then bagged them, leaving the checkout’s black conveyor belt empty.

But the conveyor belt wasn’t totally empty. There were scores of tiny, multi-color “glitter glints!” Just as the leaves drop off in autumn, so does the glitter fall from some Christmas-themed decorative items, including wreath material, miniature decorated Christmas trees, miniature houses, etc. The faux snow comes off in flakes, which, like dandruff, never melts.

The glue holding the glitter onto the twigs and leaves evidently wasn’t very strong, not that “Crazy” variety of glue in the old TV ad where a construction worker’s hard hat is glued to a girder and keeps him from falling (as long as he holds onto his hat).

Seeing the shiny glitter contrasted against the conveyor belt’s darkness, I thought about the December constellations far above the Danville Dollar Tree, with the “glint” of stars in the nighttime sky. Like the glitter, those stars have similar colors: red giants, white dwarfs, yellow like our sun, blue, green, sapphire, etc. There is one star of golden color. It’s part of a double star named Albireo. The other star in this pair is of an indigo color. It’s a pity that Alberio’s double star doesn’t consist of silver and gold. Then, it would match Burl Ives’ song “Silver and Gold” in the 1964 TV movie, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Each glint of color reminds me of different “life seasons” in the course of my years. The gleaming flecks of red and green make me think about the seventy-plus Christmases that I have experienced.

The green glimmering glitter also serves as a reminder of innumerable childhood recollections of summer during those special childhood times of weeks away from school, in which the classroom only came through the mail in the form of the Summer Weekly Reader.

Specks of white glitter made me think of dogwood flowers. And I imagined if magnification were applied, perhaps each one would have the little dark, compass-point indentations representing the marks of Good Friday’s nails and thorns. The silver specks brought back memories of the great 1960 snows, in which glistening six-foot icicles hung from the roof of my childhood home, along with other ice forms there resembling a cavern’s “flowstone.”

The bits of orange glitter reminded me of times during my teenage years when I sat, studying and writing at my bedroom desk, looking from a westward window into the late-afternoon sky.

And that orange glitter of late afternoon also reminded me of something seen throughout the day  — day lilies growing close by in my boyhood neighborhood.

Like that lady shopper, we assemble the parts of our own lifetime celebratory, custom-made “wreaths,” with their scattered “glitter-glint” days of memory, happy and sad.

So, condensing the vastness of things down to a personal level: if you’re standing there at the Danville Dollar Tree at this time of year, and if you glance down at the glitter passing by on the black conveyor belt, just give a thought to that other “conveyor belt” far above, as the stars of December likewise, “roll by,” the procession of “twinkles” above, and “glitter glints” below.