Sunday 16th December

Christmas decorations have changed out of all proportion in the fifty odd years I can remember them.  My Nana had these old paper streamers which were basically pairs of cleverly cut and glued different coloured crepe paper that concertined out as you stretched them across the room, they were so old that the colours had faded into different shades of dusty yellow and brown, but as a child I would follow their patterns across the room trying to work out how they had been made.  Every year my mother would get me to help her make streamers by twisting two crepe paper rolls, red and green, gold and white  and yellow and blue and then we pinned them to the corners and they met and were sellotaped around the light cord.  At school we licked and stuck together six inch lengths of coloured and gummed paper to make paper chains we would proudly take home.  My mother, ever the artistic one, would paint a big spindly branch white and hang teardrop baubles and lametta in silver and blue and this would be somehow fixed to a wall.  She also knew a trick of folding a square of silver foil about eight times and making a ‘V’ cut in it to produce a star, sticking two together to make ‘real’ 3d stars hanging all over the room.  The tree was always real, but they were short and fat and spiky then , not the perfect conical trees you get today.  The lights were huge, the size of tennis balls and had big screw-in bulbs and if one went they all did, and you had to unscrew the bulbs one by one to find the faulty one.  My Auntie Ruby and Uncle Albert had real candles on their tree, which they would light and turn the electric off and we would sit and wonder at them for a minute or two, and then they would be blown out until next year.  Our tree decorations were the same every year, little tinsel balls, lametta, a few chocolates in foil and a set of pale pink and fawn plastic reindeer which hung like miniature mobiles on little plastic coat-hangers.  There was always room for a tree ornament I had made in infant school; a matchbox Santa with folded paper arms and legs.  Best of all was the angel, she was very old and tattered, with a real dress of white silk and organza, and a gold wand with the tiniest piece of tinsel wrapped round it.  I cannot remember when we put our decorations up but it was much closer to Christmas day than people do now, and they came down strictly on Twelth Night too.

Years later I found in Liberty some real Chinese paper streamers and lanterns that I used for years until they were held together with more sellotape than paper, then like everyone else I ended up with plastic tinsel and streamers and light-up snowmen and all the crap we have today.  As the years go by though I feel less and less inclined to have any decorations at all; if only they still sold the paper ones like my Nana had.