Christmas Decorations, Christmas at Fingertips

Posted by dodo

Man is born free but is everywhere in paper chains.

In a pathetic attempt to be more creative last year I got a book on Christmas decorations out of the library. I could have Christmas at my fingertips, the author advised me brightly, by learning how to make a simple evergreen corsage, how to decorate an outdoor tree, how to make my own candles, and, worst of all, how to give a gala air to breakfast on Christmas morning.

Having failed to achieve multiple snowflakes, I tried to make an aluminium reindeer. ‘If your finished design is a direct physical likeness to a reindeer, it is unsuccessful,’ said the author kindly, ‘for it will not carry imagination on a significant journey.’

By the time I’d cut off two feet, a nose and an antler, and half an ear, there was no way that imagination or the reindeer was going to carry anyone anywhere and I gave up.

I turned to Good Housekeeping, who had some wild ideas about hanging baubles on your fatsia, sticking satin rosettes on your mother-in-law’s tongue, and spraying aerosol on your rubber plants. As the last time that my son sprayed our sitting- room windows with aerosol snow we couldn’t see out until August, I resisted this idea too.

If you have artistic skills and loads of time on your hands, it seems an excellent idea to employ them making elaborate Christmas decorations. Having neither, I prefer to tart up our house with huge clumps of holly and yew and trails of ivy, which all last better if you plunge them in water for a few hours after you’ve picked them. Mistletoe is essential too, hanging from a light in the hall, although it seldom has any berries left by the time you’ve fought your way back from the greengrocer’s.

It is a status symbol in America to have two Christmas trees, one inside and one out. It is a status symbol in England to have a tree that touches the ceiling.

Christmas trees were first introduced by an English missionary called St Boniface. Riding through the forest in Germany, he surprised some pagans sacrificing a youth to a huge oak tree. Appalled, St Boniface grabbed an axe, felled the oak, saved the youth, then noticed a tiny spruce, growing among the roots of the oak. ‘Let this small evergreen be your symbol of everlasting life,’ he told the pagans, and from that day the spruce has been the centre of the German Christmas. Much later, in the nineteenth century, Prince Albert introduced it to England.

St Boniface would probably have taken another axe to some of today’s artificial trees. For £5.99 in Woolworth’s you can buy a gold tinsel model that collapses like an umbrella; or for £32.95 become the proud possessor of an ‘instant, flame-resistant untarnishable, luxury, 6ft 8in ‘pine’ Christmas tree with tree-shaped lifelike branches, and realistic snow-covered needles.’

If you prefer the real thing, buy it in the market where trees are a third cheaper than in greengrocers or garden centres. Buy an English tree, as it will last longer, water it well — a few ice cubes in the earth every day work wonders — and keep it away from the radiator.

At Windsor, Prince William helps Nanny Barnes decorate the tree in the nursery of the Queen’s Tower. Straw from the stables is placed round the charming tableau of battered biblical figures. A log fire burns all day, and the Guards band plays carols outside the window.

How harmonious when compared with the fearful squabbles that break out in our house. No one can ever find the box of decorations, so a great deal of time and acrimony is wasted looking for them. One fatal year, my son aged five, found the box first and triumphantly bore it off to school where he presented it to his beautiful form mistress. Having searched for days, it was only when I rolled up for the end-of-term nativity play that I at last found all our decorations adorning his classroom.

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