Christmas-y Chit Chat

Here I am fresh from reading Marie's "A Yeae From Oak Cottage' entry in which she's telling of decorting the Christmas Tree when she was a child (gosh, what a memory - OUCH).

I'm around about the same age as Marie - well a couple of years older maybe.  She is Canadian by birth And I am English but when it comes to Christmas trees our memories are similar.  In my early childhood we always had a  real tree.  I don't remember anyone having pretend ones.  A real tree was THE smell of Christmas!  A real tree and a  coal fire.  I don't think us three kids ever knew where the tree came from.  It just sort of.....turned up.....and there it would be standing in the corner on a chair to make it seem a bit taller.  

We had no such thing as a proper stand for it.  Dad would usually plant it in a big bucket - the coal scuttle often - and the first job was to camouflage that with red crepe paper.  Then the first thing the tree would always do was l-e-a-n one way or another.  That was why, in our house, the tree was always left until next day:  to see which way it was going to go so dad could shore it up.  And there would be us three all clamouring to get started!   "The baubles are still in the false roof," mum would protest.  They never were, the fibber, they were in her wardrobe.  By the way, "the false roof" wsas what we would call the loft these days.  I don't know why it was called that but anyway, it was the  void between ceiling and apex, used to store things we would be lost without.  Not much difference there then!

After school next day we would start.  In later years, when I was 10 or 11 we had 'fairy lights' and, as in Marie's experience, they never, never worked, though they had been fine when put away the previous year.  And they were all tangled up, though they hadn't been, and dad would drape them out around all the furniture
to get them straight and find out which lights were not working.  It only took one to put the whole lot out but you had to check them all before dad was despatched to buy however many new bulbs.  They were only tiny things but I remember mum scratting about in her purse to find enough money for them. 

Then there would - at long last - be the ceremonial draping of the lights.  It wasn't ceremonial really but it always seemed to us that dad spent an unconscionable amount of time doing ir!  Then the precious boxes were opened and mum  - ON HER OWN - would hang these glass baubles.  They were donkeys' years old some of them, and ever so pretty and delicate and us ham fisted little terrors were banished.  Well, one of us would be detailed to cut off short lengths from a reel of cotton so mum could tie them through the wire loops to hang them up.  No kidding, us lot were chomping at the bit by this time!  For goodness sake if they didn't get a move on between them it would be bedtime and we wouldn't get to do our bit,

We always did though!  Two of us would have litlle packets of stuff called Lametta (I think you can still get it) which was long thin strips of shiny silvery paper which we draped over the tree branches to represent icicles.  The third one would have a packet of cotton wool.  With this you had to pull off little bits and throw them at the tree.  These were meant to be snowflake

Then the littlest (our Gwyn) was hoisted up to put the fairy on the top.  Finally, off would go the room lights and the tree lights switched on.  Nothing "designer" about our tree.  Every colour known to man and, apart from the vey classy baubles, any Christmassy decoration considered nice enough.

How we loved that riot of colour.  Christmas was here!