Christmas tree

A jolly Covid Christmas upcoming…

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I dashed into our local big outdoor shopping mall whilst passing on another errand earlier, looking for a few last-minute gifts. What a grim experience… I went into one shop, which was rammed, and the little assistant by the door said to the guy immediately behind me (far too close!) “Please may I remind you, sir, to wear a face covering in the store?” to which he snorted, “It’s not a law, you can’t make me; do you want my money or not?” The poor little lass just looked down; she was evidently used to this & knew not to antagonise. The place was full of aimless plastic & polyester tat and people barging around with no regard for personal space, never mind social distancing, so I left & tried another place, a well-known kitchenware shop, which wasn’t so crowded & didn’t seem to be attracting so many idiots. There were some good things, but at very silly prices. They’ll be half that price next week, and so they should be! So I just bought a couple of everyday necessities and left empty-handed; I don’t go down there very often. It seemed to me that people are behaving every bit as daftly as they normally do at this time of year, totally ignoring the enhanced risk of the mutated virus. I think I’d rather risk disappointing my family & friends than shop with the herd again…

It was also noticeable how slowly everyone was driving. Conditions weren’t that bad; grey & drizzly, admittedly, but no worse than that. But we were trundling slowly along at a very steady & careful 27mph in a 40 zone before the driver in front of me nearly wavered into the kerb & I suddenly realised that it was lunchtime & they’d quite possibly had a bracing snifter or two; I think there’s a lot of that about, with people stressed by what seems like an endless onslaught of bad & worrying news, health, job & money worries and the pressure of trying to keep up appearances over the “festive season”. Or more worryingly, perhaps they weren’t feeling very well…

We are very much amongst the lucky ones this year. We have 3 of our 5 offspring here at home, with a 4th not very far away. Eldest and his delightful partner unfortunately still live in Tier 4 so won’t be joining us, except digitally, but we’re all healthy (so far!) & have plenty of food in the house & at the allotment. I’m sad for all those who will be alone, and those who don’t have enough to eat, never mind presents for the kids. And as for those with no roof over their heads, in this endlessly grim drizzle that will only end as the temperature falls… my heart sinks. What are we thinking, to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace with an orgy of buying plastic & polyester tat? Stuffing ourselves with expensive, unhealthily-processed foods when many don’t have enough to eat? And doing what I did today, actually risking our lives by rushing into crowded spaces where some people have no intention of following the guidelines, in pursuit of the “perfect” present?

Count me out of that next year, please… in the meantime, I’m wishing you all a happy & peaceful Christmas and a healthy & merry-hearted New Year.

Tree from our local RSPB reserve, decorated with baubles rescued from the Tip, hand-painted be-glittered fir cones and walnut shells – oh, and the non-recycled odd candy cane!

Something somewhere isn’t right…

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I had to run up to the supermarket on Saturday afternoon, having muddled up what should go into the freezer and what should go into the fridge after doing my market shop on Friday. (Excuse: I’d had a streaming cold since the start of the week.) I could hear carols floating over the allotments from one of the churches as I went up our road, and more carols floating over the green from the direction of the Square. The Christmas lights were flashing frantically, cars were circling the car park like hungry sharks, waiting to pounce on a space, and the supermarket was thronged with customers pushing overloaded trolleys stuffed with cheese dartboards and gallons of wine. Snatches of irritated conversations drifted past my ears…

“No, that was for Christmas Eve, dear. The cream is for Boxing Day!”

“Not that one, you know Jessica’s allergic to red colourants!”

“No, no, the Heston, not the Jamie!”

“Sorry, sir, we’ve sold right out of those now.”

I felt as if I’d landed on the wrong planet, not for the first time in the last few weeks. There was still more than a week to go until Christmas, but the good citizens of East Dorset are stocking up in good time, and by the looks of their trolleys they are all entertaining at least 20 people they desperately need to impress. Me, I’m just feeding 9, with mostly cooked-from-scratch-by-us food, some of it even grown-by-us. It’ll be a joint enterprise, and we’ll have a laugh as we prepare it together and try to cram 9 seats into our kitchen; the conservatory, which is much bigger, would be too cold for my 91 y.o. mother.

I’ve also had occasion to enter that great temple of Mammon, the Giant Shopping Centre in the big city 30 miles east. More flashing lights, lots of must-haves, more eye-watering prices for things that no-one needs, which might just raise a slight smile before ending up in a charity shop or possibly even the bin. Somehow it just all felt utterly surreal, absolutely divorced from any vestige of reality. No hint of midwinter magic, no connection to the Reason for the Season, not a glimmer of anything in any way genuine or personal. All that pressure to spend, spend, spend; all that glitter, no real gold.

We visited a new Scandinavian shop. There were some nice things, some of them definitely referencing genuine Scandinavian Christmas/Yule/midwinter traditions. But mostly, alas, just more plastic tat. I did buy a couple of items, one of them edible, one that will replace something that broke last year. But I can’t shake off a feeling that something underneath all this glitter and fake bonhomie and enforced generosity is terribly, horribly wrong… That this celebration really shouldn’t be all about greed, or even misplaced generosity. In all Northern Hemisphere traditions, it’s a celebration of the return of Light to the world, a promise that the darkness will be vanquished and growth will return. In the Christian tradition, a feast and a gift-giving to celebrate God’s gift to us.

I’ve been reading up about Christmas traditions all around the world. It seems that most people in most countries don’t put up their trees or decorate their houses until about the 23rd or 24th of December, which is how it was in the home I grew up in, in the dim & distant past. In many countries, the main meal & present-giving is actually on the evening of Christmas Eve, with Christmas Day being reserved for church and family visits. Boxing Day is livelier, with sport & dancing back on the menu, but still very sociable & family-based, rather than a rush to spend yet more money at the “sales”. In some countries, gift-giving doesn’t happen until Epiphany, or 6th January, tying in with the visit of the Kings to the baby Jesus, with their gifts of gold, frankincense & myrrh.

I particularly love the Icelandic idea of the jólabókaflóð, or Yule Book Flood, where everyone receives at least one book on Christmas Eve, then retires to bed with chocolate to read it. Of course, by then they’ve done the big meal and the gift-giving, but how much more relaxed & sane than my usual frantic last-minute Christmas Eve scrambles does that sound?!

I suspect we could learn a lot from countries that take a more laid-back & sociable approach to Christmas. Somehow we’ve been railroaded into the spend, spend, spend mentality & the one with the lowest credit card bill is a loser. Not a game I want to play any longer… judging by people’s anxious faces in the mall, I’m not alone.

So I think I’m going to re-think Christmas-yet-to-come (again!) and take a leaf out of other books from all over the world. We’ll start low, just with an Advent wreath at the start of the month, and build up slowly; the tree certainly can, and should, wait until 23rd at the earliest. I shall insist on at least one book all round for Christmas, too, although retiring to bed with it and a box of chocs probably isn’t practical until Boxing Day evening. It’s important to me that we don’t feel “all Christmassed out” by the 26th, as we so often have done; that there’s time for calm reflection, and there are genuine moments of holiness and sheer magic.  Time to listen to the rhythms of the earth and sky, hear the birds sing and the bells ring out.

And of course, time to wish all my friends “out there” a genuinely happy and peaceful Christmas – or whatever midwinter festival speaks best to you.

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An early tree…

Re-used, renewed…

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My lovely mother is over 90 years old. She’s had a rough time of it for the last couple of years, since my dear stepfather drifted gently away. The first Christmas after he died, we had to “spring” her from hospital into a nursing home, possibly before she was really ready to come home but considerably after the hospital started trying to discharge her. The second, last year, she’d not long been out of hospital again, and had no heart for celebration; we did her a jolly little Christmas tree for her flat, but she didn’t want us to use the old family decorations, some of which are probably older than I am. “Too many memories,” she said wistfully. So I made some small-scale decorations from various odds & sods I had hanging around, and it did raise a little smile.

So this year, I took her our old fake tree, complete with the decorations we used last year.  Once again, she’s not that long out of hospital (the main reason I’ve been so quiet) & currently has a live-in carer helping her rehabilitation. But this year, once I’d festooned it with last year’s decorations, she said, “It’s hardly got anything on it! Be a darling & fetch the box from the top of the wardrobe…”

So the old decorations came out again. I had to be careful not to overload it, but I think she’d quite have liked to use every decoration & length of tinsel in the box. I caught her beaming at the tree when she thought I wasn’t looking, and she was rather chuffed when we spotted a helper at window of the nursing home opposite pointing the tree out to a resident. She may not be as well as she’d like to be, and still has a long hard road ahead  to regain her relative independence, but something somewhere inside is healing all the same.

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Knit your own tree, part II…

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Just a little festive tale, hopefully to amuse you all… every year, my kids always express a nostalgic longing for a “real” Christmas tree. And every year, being not only the skinflintiest of skinflints, but also someone who doesn’t like to feel responsible for encouraging the aimless slaughter of innocent trees, I say, of course we can have one, provided it doesn’t cost more than about £10 less than any “real” tree actually available in our neighbourhood…

I went to pick up Dear Son no.3 from his university city on Tuesday. I needed some lightbulbs and one or two other small things, and by this point in the festive season I’m always very short of time, so I decided to leave half an hour early & pop into a well-known Scandinavian emporium en route, rather than make a separate trip down to our nearest city, which would have taken over an hour.

For the last few years, they’ve done an offer of “buy a tree for £25, receive a £20 voucher” to spend in the New Year. Which makes the tree very reasonable; basically £5, provided you can get back there in January/February & spend the voucher on things you actually need. And indeed I will be going back there, and there are things  – like lightbulbs – which they do very well, and it does no harm to have a few extra in stock. But being so close to Christmas, I assumed they would have sold out of their very-reasonable trees long ago.

But whilst I was hurtling round the store, a voice announced over the tannoy that the offer had become rather better, as they’d been left with a fair number of trees & it was getting rather late to sell them. The trees were now just £5, but buyers would still get the £20 voucher. Which means, in effect, that they were (potentially) paying us £15 to take them away!

That, of course, was easily inside the arbitrary limit that I’d set. So a beautiful little Nordmann fir came home with me (little because our living room is little; they had bigger ones but I don’t have a bigger room!) and has been decorated with 1001 precious little memories, and is gracing a corner of our lives for the next 12 days.

We do have a very nice “fake” tree, from the same source, also bought for much less than the original price. But it will still be in the loft to be used next year, if I can’t track down a tree for free (or very little) that isn’t otherwise going to be used. But I doubt that I will ever again effectively be paid to take one away…

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Wishing you all a merry, lighthearted & peaceful Christmas – or Yule, or Hanukkah, or Midwinter festival.

Knit your own Christmas tree…

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Not really! But surely I’m not the only person dismayed by the price of “real” trees and the profligacy of a society that just throws out perfectly good imitation trees just because they’re not this year’s colour or shape, or don’t fit the space available any more?

This week it became apparent that a small, pre-decorated Christmas tree might make a nice surprise for someone. So off I went to my favourite emporium, the local Tip, where needless to say they’ve been inundated with redundant Christmas trees over the last few weeks. A few pennies secured me a promising well-taped-up box, which said it contained a 6′ “Woodland Pine” tree. As the box was only about 3′ long, I was fairly sure that this would be easily re-jigged into a smaller tree, and so it proved when I got home; three graduated trunk sections, with lots of slot-in “branches”, taped with different colours according to size. It just took a minute with a pair of pliers to move the fitting that the top piece of the tree sits in from the middle to the lowest section of the trunk, and a small bit of masking tape wound round to make it stay put in the larger tube, making a 3-4′ tree. The smaller branches slot into the lower trunk perfectly well, and the plastic stand was unbroken. It’s not a thing of beauty, but I’ve tied a festive-coloured scarf around it so it’s not visible.

I happened to be visiting the city this morning, and visits to £land and W!lko’s secured me two small sets of battery lights, one clear and one coloured. The intended recipient doesn’t bend too easily, so I thought battery lights would be easier for them to cope with. I’d already bought some pretty acrylic “jewel drops” for our own tree; there were more in the box than we’ll need, so I put some on the little tree to scatter the lights. And I’ve made some felt hearts out of old, moth-eaten blankets, stitched round with gold thread rescued from old needlework boxes, and some of those have found their way onto the tree too.

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However I did bust the budget when it came to topping the tree; it had to be an angel or a star, and I didn’t have anything suitable, or enough time to make something. So off we trotted to a town up the road which has a an all-year-round Christmas shop, where I invested in a pretty little glass angel, which gives the impression of being lit up with an LED or two underneath her. But she is not in any way begrudged; I’m just glad that saving money on the tree itself has allowed me to buy the loveliest tree-topper in town!

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