The Night Before Christmas

I think I’ve had a bit of a turnaround in recent years. From being someone who thoroughly detested Christmas it’s now a time of year I rather enjoy. It might be having kids that does it but in the past years we have tended to go for more of a German Christmas celebration. Partly, this has been because we have been in Germany for several Christmases but also, in our old house, we didn’t have a chimney breast to do the whole Santa-comes-down-the-chimney routine. Instead we have always had Santa visit the house – except for last year when Santa crashed the sledge and I had to go an pick up the presents – in fact it was more a case that it was -15C outside and the Santa costume didn’t bleeding fit anymore.

With us moving to the new house, we can now go for more of a British type of Christmas – or at least the Dickensian type of faery-tale that I have a certain fondness for. Given that we have the high ceilings and Victoriana around the house it seems all the more fitting. The first task was to get a big tree. The thing with Christmas trees is that they have gone very expensive in the last few years. Part of the reason for this is that they are either varieties designed to keep their needles longer or they have been treated specially to retain them. They will all drop their leaves eventually (as they are all, essentially, dead trees) and I have an old trick that works far more effectively which is to leave the tree out in the garden for a few nights so it gets the frost or snowed on or both. My mother in law didn’t do this and the little tree that she bought lost needles like crazy. She tried to move it yesterday to hoover around it and the remaining needles dropped off leaving a naked twig which she then flung out into the back garden in a fit of pique. She has now has a bowl of baubles sitting on the table with some fairy lights arranged over the top: it’s what I like to call “The Emperor’s New Christmas Tree.”

As for our tree, I went for a traditional fir in what I would describe as the biggest, silliest thing I could find. It was described as being a 2.5 metre tree but when I eventually measured it at home it came to a whopping 2.7 metres. I say eventually as it does help to get a 2.7 metre tree home if one remembers to take a 2.7 metre car along to transport it. Anyway, I think it looks rather good and at least looks in proportion against my idiotically huge telly:

  One thing you may have noticed is that there is no star or angel on top. This is because Raymond was entrusted to “make” an angel and this is what he came up with (and which Nina wasn’t having anything to do with):

Well, I suppose Doctor Who is now part of a traditional Christmas. The other thing was to hang the socks in front of the fireplace. This does have the advantage in that we can encourage the children to go to bed early although I did actually struggle to find anything to hang them from:

Now, the fireplace is not fully open and this is why I had my own suspicions about Santa’s modus operandi as a child (we went smokeless and the fire place was blocked up). Anyway, surely Santa is magic and can get around that little problem. It looks like he is more svelte than one would have imagined:

The only downside is that we don’t have snow at Christmas for the first time in years. In fact we have had torrential rain all day. Oh well, Merry Christmas!