For 18 Christmases, Craig Mason of Kailua has presented his wife, Teri Mason, with a wooden ornament he’s made by hand. She never takes the gift for granted, though.

“I have to wait till Christmas morning,” the pretty, blue-eyed Mason said. “Every year I hope, but he never lets on before.”

She carefully lifted a dark-brown milo wood bell from a box filled with all the ornaments she has received. “This was the first one,” she said with a smile.

Since then, Craig Mason’s delicate designs have grown ever more elegant and abstract, with the exception of a birdhouse occupied by a tiny blue bird. “I didn’t make the bird,” he said.

While each piece was made from different woods, most were riffs on a basic shape: a hollow, polished orb balanced on a long narrow spindle with a tiny, hand-turned “captive ring” encircling the tip.

“The shape has evolved,” said Mason, 65, a 20-year member of the Honolulu Woodturners Club who salvages wood from construction scraps or trees that were cleared.

“We make use of trees that had to come down,” Mason said of the 100-plus members of the club, whose webmaster sends out alerts when he hears of trees being cut.

Mason incorporates other natural objects, such as a purple sea urchin shell or the horn of an axis deer from Lanai.

The orbs glow with the many colors and grains of the various woods: koa, milo, macadamia nut, jacaranda, cherry, English boxwood, ebony, maple and humble plywood. A long, delicate spiral “shell” of lychee wood had been carved according to a mathematical equation. A golden globe was made of Norfolk pine, as was a pale sphere etched with holly sprigs.

The ornaments are as light and delicate as eggs: Some, including an intricately pieced plywood ball and a boxwood-and-ebony globe with an openwork heart-motif screen, had been honed to an eggshell thickness.

A retired dentist, Mason uses the tools of his trade, including a drill, to pierce and etch his intricate creations.

It all started when the Honolulu Woodturners Club chose Christmas ornaments as its annual challenge. Mason hasn’t missed a year yet.

“This will be the 19th — if I give her one this year,” he said.

The Masons, both native Iowans, have been married for 42 years; they met as undergraduates at Iowa State University and moved to Hawaii when Craig Mason was posted here as a Navy dentist.

He also makes steel guitars, ukulele and pahu drums that are played by the couple’s two children and four grandchildren. Teri Mason’s creative outlet is cooking; for Christmas, she makes “old family recipes from Italy: panettone, panforte, zuppa inglese.”

If she should be so lucky as to receive a new wooden ornament from her husband, she said, she will hang it on the little palm tree made of koa where she displays her trove year-round.