Deck the halls…

Every year I think about writing this blog, and every year I don’t. Usually in the run up it’s too busy and then, as the Christmas dinner has been eaten, the last mince pie devoured, and New Year hoves into view, it feels too late to do, another opportunity gone.

But today, on this soggy grey winter solstice, it feels like the time has come! Time to write a little about the intensely personal ritual that is my Christmas…

Times past.

I grew up in a family where there was no religion, no spirituality, and yet I was surrounded by tradition and, dare I say it, ritual. We marked the longest and shortest days with a special meal and Christmas was always a time for good food …and decorations.

Each of these decorations had, and still has, a story: be it the Father Christmas box made by me, aged 5, from a treacle tin, red sugar paper and cotton wool, which was filled with a tiny present to each member of my family (part of the challenge was that Santa’s cone hat had to fit even with all presents within) to be opened each Christmas Eve, or The Furry who lived on the top of our Christmas tree until his amorphous sheepskin body crumbled to dust, leaving only a pair of felt eyes, one December day back in the 1980s.

As I had a daughter of my own, the traditions continued, and now she has reached her 21st year, these show no sign of stopping: we still decorate the house a certain way, and fill each other a stocking each Christmas Eve, followed by the – increasingly difficult and hilarious – tradition of having ‘Santa’ deposit the stocking into each other’s room, without being noticed, before Christmas day dawns…

Christmas present.

Each year, on 1st December, the snowflakes go up on my house windows. Always the first thing to be done, they presage the Christmas season.

These are followed by the rest of the decorations, including a tree, many knick-knacks and the obligatory tinsel!

As I get each decoration out, I do think of the story of each: the Scottish craft exhibition where I bought that little panda heart, the painted snowman wooden plaque my daughter was so proud of making at school:

I also conservation-check my favourite papier-mâché penguin, who got improperly packed *by someone* in the loft one year and who had to be repaired the following year when it was discovered that damp had got into his feet and exploded his legs (there’s a reason I’m divorced…).

My decorations only go back about 50 years, with most being much younger: the ancestral decorations still rest with my mum. Many of these ancient gaudy baubles have histories which remain unknown to any but my mum, the keeper of lore: our elderly neighbour, Mr. Franklin’s, tacky plastic snowflakes, which become less tacky when you know they are almost a century old. The plastic candy cane and poinsettia garland that came from the Sheepskin Shop in Brighton, in the 1960s, where my grandmother worked: did she buy them or acquire them by other means? With that side of my family, you can never be sure…

But as in life, so it is in decorations, and Christmas memories are not always happy ones: Auntie Betty’s little plastic Santa – one of the few remaining memories we have of her and which is especially poignant as she was incarcerated in a mental hospital having been abused by a catholic priest. I also have annual memories of grim Christmases past spent with awful extended family, in-laws etc: it is never all joy.

The Christmas tree.

My christmas tree, purchased from Wilkos twenty years ago for three quid, is also an every year tradition. Living in a small house, with only limited christmas tree siting options, small works, and each year it gleams out from its window sill perch amidst the little light up houses and window snowflakes.

I don’t follow a colour theme and there is just about everything that there can be on it from tiny silver and gold bells (which used to be used by my daughter to summon Santa’s reindeer to a feast of porridge oats and glitter in the garden each year) to glass angels that remind me of similar foil ones we had as I was growing up…

There’s also a little christmas wreath, taken from a long since discarded christmas card, which has to sit near the top of the tree and, since the year of my divorce, a set of sequined clip-on birds, bought by me to ring in the new in the run up to Christmas 2017…

The front window

Until 2020, the tree and snowflakes were the only things to be found in the window looking out on our small, one way street, but then Covid came and the winter seemed especially dark.

We decided we needed more light and sparkle, and so the Machling Towers Illuminations were born… much to the amusement and despair of my very restrained neighbours. Five years later, we still do this each year and, even though they now go up before my daughter comes home from university, they are part of The Tradition, and the enjoyment of hearing littlies gasping or singing spontaneous carols as they trot past has not yet faded.

The Grotty

Another Machling family tradition is the Grotty: lovingly arranged each year by my daughter, it has to be done with Christmas music playing (…and if you’ve never heard the insanity that is the 50s American Ray Conniff singers ‘do’ Christmas you really should… you can thank my mum for that one!) and mulled apple juice drunk.

The precise lay out of the Grotty changes from year to year, but always contains the same characters, and also has to somewhere contain the teeny Christmas tree, pulled from a cracker by little me, some fifty years ago…

Deck the halls.

This year we have also inherited something new, but from my childhood: the crepe paper twisted decorations. Anyone of a certain age will be groaning at this point but, please don’t spoil it: my daughter is yet to experience the joy of unfurling and twisting the pretty paper garlands…

…and then realising on Twelfth Night that they have to be rewound into their carefully furled rolls!!! Another christmas right of passage!

Ritual

Archaeologically, the material culture and traditions of Christmas have always struck me as fascinating: most of us have very personal, very specific, ways of ‘doing’ Christmas, and many of those traditions, things and decorations would be utterly unreadable to anyone outside our families or friend groups.

The story behind a particular bauble, the history of that weird little knackered paper angel, the passing down of lore – and artefacts – between generations. How those stories are added to, embellished and passed on: and all of it part of this faintly religious, yet oddly secular, societal festival where we feast, revere the non-drop tree and gather – to often tear strips off each other – for that one ‘special’ day a year.

Never mind the past being a foreign country, understanding the modern Christmas is task enough. I do think that, although the past is very much a different place, there are insights we can take from our own modern experience, if nothing else to acknowledge that however much we think we know, we can never entirely understand the motivations, peculiarities or nuance of events so far in the distant past.

However, I do like to think that at Durrington Walls, December 2049BCE, Stone-Shaper was pissed off at having to do all the pig butchery, the Shaman was having trouble getting everyone ready for the shortest day…

…and little Sun-Rising picked up a sparkly stone, popped it into the fold of her clothes and felt happy that she’d found such a beautiful thing that would always remind her of this day!

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[I hope that, wherever you are, and however you do it, that you have a restful and calm holiday: remember that the longer days start today. Do please share your Christmas traditions too, they really are – all – truly wonderful.]

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And remember, Christmas can also be shite for many (I’ve been there) so, some thoughts and helpful numbers below: