So this is Christmas…
“But what are you to do, as a die hard Christmas romantic, when you’ve married a man who would happily work your favourite day away?”
My husband comes from a family, that seemed to have only ever given a passing nod to the silly season. As his lovely Mum once guiltily confided in me, “I put up the tree one year when the kids were little and I never did it again”. Dan remember’s it slightly differently. That they did in-fact have an artificial tree (much like the one I grew up with in Australia) that was put up for several years. He recalls fondly bending back the foldable branches until they snapped, making his sister cry. Much of Dan’s fond childhood memories seem to revolve around destruction and mayhem. Perhaps that’s why it didn’t seem worth it to put up the tree every year.
It had never really occurred to me that families, in the Christian Faith, or in the western (or western adjacent) world might not pay homage, if not to the birth of Christ, at the very least to the holiday season. The excitement of a Christmas tree, presents, Christmas music, Christmas films (Let’s just call Die Hard ‘Christmas adjacent’ but essential seasonal viewing, ok?), cooking and, of course EATING. Overwhelming family gatherings that leave you exhausted, crackers, decorations, games and laughter, were drilled into and electrified me.
At 35, the spirit of Christmas very much still lives within me. Only once, or maybe twice, has the opening chords of Mariah’s Christmas Classic ‘All I want for Christmas’ filled me with a sense of dread. We can attribute that to Tuk tuk’s that stalk central London flocks of tourists, disguising their scam in the sheep’s clothing of cheap tinsel, coloured lights (oh how gauche!) and, as already mentioned, wreathed in the music of the Christmas diva’s elaborate vocal runs. The streets of central Paris (where I now reside) don’t allow for such things and so, in spite of best efforts, my Christmas enthusiasm cannot be shaken. Mariah can sing safely again.
After moving to the northern hemisphere from Australia, my longing for Christmas deepened. Where my husband calls the weather miserable and grey, I call the air invigorating and fresh, the rain inviting us to enjoy it’s soothing rhythms as we snuggle down with a book and a carol or two infecting the very air with wintery joy. Chocolat Chaud was designed to be drunk in the cold, chestnuts to be roasted on an open fire (or on the streets of Paris on large steel hubcaps resting in a shopping trolley), and I will forever look to the grey heavens and cry '‘Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!’. I may not have ever known a white Christmas, but I'll be a monkey’s uncle if I don’t keep dreaming of it.
But what are you to do, as a die hard Christmas romantic, when you’ve married a man who would happily work your favourite day away? As a couple in constant flux, the statement ‘we’ll buy a tree, when we have a house’ filled me with a yearly disappointment, that it must have been hard to live with. The reasonableness of the statement left me with not much to say. But reason has nothing to do with magic, so I'm sure I looked like a disappointed old Orange, whose aspirations to be part of the Christingle have been dashed. Sour and pouty. I created a dread of the very thing, I wanted to teach him the magic of. The conversations around Christmas, were sure to leave me feeling disappointed and Dan frustrated and misunderstood.
And yet there was a reality to his reticence. A feeling that it was, just one more thing we didn’t need. We were going to move, we didn’t have the money, it was just a single day, there was no family around. And so, for the past 5 years Dan and I haven’t had a Christmas Tree. In our first year together, we did cook a turkey roll for two. Our second year, I bought a few little gifts, but we spent most of the blessed day moaning and groaning on the couch, not as a result of the obligatory Christmas lunch coma, but both of us desperately ill as we recovered from Covid. Our third year together, we had just moved back to London after Dan’s Parisian internship, and again the end of a gruelling year put us in ‘recover and survive’ mode. Year 4 and 5 were so uneventful they aren’t even worth commenting on except to say I don’t remember year 4 at all and year 5 I vaguely remember an argument. Family arguments are not one of the preferred Christmas traditions, even though they are sometimes inevitable.
“It was enough, I knew, to get us started. Because the rest was about creating memories together. Collecting a box of precious memories, that we would dust off every year and reflect on with gratitude.”
Slowly the magic was dying. The older I became, the more complex life, and little by little we were allowing life to squeeze the magic out of Christmas. I longed for family most on Christmas Day. I longed for tradition. For magic. And poor Dan, he was working so hard, and magic takes work. Magic takes thought, pre planning and honest engagement. And he really, really didn’t have the time or know where to begin.
And so this year, desperate to turn a new page, I chose not to be a victim of my own longing. Traditions must start somewhere. And when I think of tradition, I think of my Mum. My Mum was always my family’s Christmas Glue. She may not have been the most organised, but the lady knows how to make Christmas magic come alive on a dime. And her Christmas magic took effort, planning, financial investment and often late nights.
Every year, my Dad would pull the artificial tree out of the roof, and my Mum would cover the house in elegant, Christmas joy. The music would be put on and the lights would go up. The nativity would be placed on a buffet, the ancient star tenderly pulled out of its crumbled cardboard protector and placed delicately on the top of the tree. The red table runners with tassels, and the beautiful golden reindeer on the entrance table, the delicate gold wafer thin nativity ornament that must have central positioning on the tree, my favourite train ornament, and my childhood Christmas stocking with the Rocking Horse. Each precious item collected over years, and stored for 11 months of the years - kept for the sole purpose of creating one month out of the year.
We would open the boxes, my Dad had pulled out from the roof, covered in dust and debris. Here is the frosted pinecone my sister made as a child. Here’s the table decoration I bought that year I cooked the Christmas dinner. Hey, remember how good Granny’s Christmas stuffing used to be? Remember how badly I messed it up that time? Memories would flood my mind. My last Christmas-Eve before my big adventure to England, running through the a Woolworths, whilst Mum sprinted through Coles all in search of the last available Christmas turkey. The elation as we declared, in breathless hoops of joy, “We found one!“ and then falling apart, laughing at it all. Laughing about how disastrous it felt it might be to not find one, how close we came to being turkyless. I recall the year we had left making our plans so late that my brothers, Mum, Dad and I declared ‘Chicken Nuggets for Christmas Lunch’ and made our way to drive through Red Rooster, only to find a Christmas Feast open at a local Football Club. A small Christmas Miracle.
Each each night before Christmas, we would watch ‘Carols by Candlelight’ on the television (an annual televised concert in Australia) whilst my Mum would sit on the floor in her nighty telling every one to ‘look away’ whilst she hurriedly wrapped her mystery bundles. The many presents she had loving and thoughtfully selected for each of us (and which my Dad had lovingly paid for, of course). The highlight of my night was always the performance of ‘The Holy City’. The drums would roar into a joyous rolling march and my spirit would soar as the words ‘Hosanna in the highest, Hosanna for ever more!’ lifted me up and out of myself. The next day, like magic, we would come down and the sparkling Christmas tree would be sheltering a veritable mountain of beautifully wrapped presents. Sorry Father Christmas, but this one was all Mum.
Breakfast was always a gourmet spread of chocolate-covered-strawberries, plunger coffee and fresh orange juice. In the early days we would indulge in the now discontinued and rather unfortunately named ‘Nut Feast’ cereal. It was a genuine, luxury treat. As time passed we replace Nut feast with warm croissants, jams, fancy yogurts and fruit salad.
Sitting together we would read the story of the Birth of Jesus and pray. I am forever grateful for this tradition. A pause, a moment of reflection which charges the air with a sense of joyous gratitude. That which is coming to us is a blessing. My Dad, the true Father Christmas of the moment, would don his Santa Claus hat and one by one, hand out gifts. We would watch as the person opens their gift. We had time, and revelling in other joy was just as good as ripping apart the paper yourself.
And so, after a 5 year drought, this year is different. Putting the apathy of Dan’s Christmas spirit aside, I ordered my first Christmas tree. I ordered it way too early (after 5 years of Christmas drought I was a little trigger happy). It may die before Christmas, but that’s going to be a new story in the annuls of my new family- I already love it. ‘Hey Baby, remember the first year we bought I tree and I bought a real one in NOVEMBER?’. We will laugh, I can hear it now.
Yes, my tree is real and it smells fantastic. I won’t lie to you. I quite literally danced for joy after the delivery driver left. The tree came wrapped in a net and the wooden log it was using for a base which was, of course, lopsided. I ordered the basics on Amazon. The LED lights (warm of course, white light…how gauche?), bauble hooks and a box of frosted pinecones with silver string to hook them on the branches. I ordered little Gingerbread House ornaments and frosted Red Letter Boxes. I made a visit to Leroy Merlin (a local hardware store) and bought red, gold and white frosted baubles, some gold tinsel, a sparkly gold star tree topper, sparkly red Ponsiana flowers and two little snow covered birds that clip into the tree. It was enough, I knew, to get us started. Because the rest was about creating memories together. Collecting a box of precious memories, that we would dust off every year and reflect on with gratitude.
We were forced to wait for a couple of days as we had ordered a tree stand that was meant to keep our tree hydrated in the arid environment of our apartment (my husband is apparently part camel, as his preferred operating environment is desert). Anxious and impatient to get started I pulled out my humidifier to keep the tree hydrated with cool mist. We waited two days at home, including misdelivieries, before my rapidly degrading Christmas spirit, turned into a toddler tantrum. Cursing the incompetence of delivery men, and loudly declaring (rather redundantly)‘I’m Grumpy!’. Dan put down his video game (a well deserved weekend respite from a heavy week at work) and was now dedicated to problem solving. Ladies - give your man a problem to solve. I'm telling you it works, and whilst I do not endorse tantrums, I'm just saying that a problem to solve and pouty lip may, on occasion, serve a purpose. Again - This author does not endorse toddler tantrums.
Now, fully engaged in Project Christmas Tree (or Project Stop my wife’s grumpies), Dan masterfully fashioned a prop out of amazon boxes to make sure the tree stood tall and we could begin. My mood magically lifted from the doldrums as we took some scissors to the net and released the tree. And so it was that on a Saturday night in November, lit by the soft glow of the Youtube fireplace, and carols in the air, we began. As all good Christmas traditions begin with I pulled out our snacks (in our currently adults onliy household - whiskey), as Christmas merriment, is about all the senses. The Sound of the carols, the smell of the tree, the touch of the tinsel and glitter, all of it pulling together to create a feast for the eyes, and (if you’ll excuse a disgusting display of sentimentality) fire in your heart.
As the branches settled, I watched myself an my husband transform. We had a project, and we knew at the end and it would be beautiful. I don’t know what it is about the presence of a real life tree in our lounge room that, even before we began to decorate, created an atmosphere of wonder, but it did.
You know how it goes now. For anyone who doesn’t, the order is as follows;
The lights
The tinsel
The baubles
The ornaments (special baubles and ornaments go on, after you’ve laid a decorational foundation of what I call the base or primary baubles)
The Star or Angel tree topper.
Whilst much of this post is to tell you that there is no right way to start traditions, I will say that the above Christmas tree decoration order is only common sense and it would be beyond foolishness to attempt it in any other way, lest you should wish to appear the simpleton. You have been warned.
“In these small moments, I had felt something shift”
As we hung the lights I looked over. My husband, at once apathetic to the idea of a Christmas tree, had an intense look of concentration on his face as he looped the string of lights through his theracane and used it as an arm extender to bring the lights up and around our 2m tall tree. He had come up with this solution to avoid having to pull the tree out from the wall or have his wife stand on a chair without a safety harness (standing on chairs to Dan, it seems, is justifiably proximate to swimming with sharks). With each satisfactory turn around the tree, he would smile. That dimply smile of satisfaction, that so frequently leaves me weak at the knees. Pure magic. Something had shifted. I was glad not to have made a fuss when he refused to let me stand on the chair, or else I might have missed this.
In truth, after the lights and the whisky, we were sleepy and went to bed (give us a break, we never dreamed we’d be 35!). Despite this, we were filled with anticipation, and the first thing we did when we got up on Sunday morning was to decorate the tree. Standing there in our pyjamas, we couldn’t walk past the beautiful tree without finishing what we had begun. We picked up the baubles and the hooks and began again. As we navigated the tinsel and baubles into place, we stood back to admire each placement. ‘Where do you think this should go?’, ‘I think the red letter boxes should go here’, ‘Oh that look pretty, baby!’. Together we put up our Christmas instalment. We discovered the porcelain gingerbread houses were too heavy for our tree, and instead a wintery Christmas Village appeared in front of our tv, complete with foliage that the tree had willingly dropped to spread its Christmas cheer across the length of the living room.
In spite of the miserable weather, we braved the elements, and we made trip to Zara Home near the Madeline. Dan had asked me not to buy any more ornaments, because he wanted to be a part of it. Who am I to object to such a request? And so I waited and we went together. Here I hoped to find a golden train ornament similar to one of my childhood favourites. Running in out of the downpour, we marvelled at the beautiful display in the middle of the show room. A Parisian Apartment block, gently frosted, with little mice and rabbits celebrating Christmas in their lit up apartment windows. In each room a different tableau; Eating tiny roast turkey or playing Christmas games in tiny elegant living rooms by a fire. Whilst we did not find the train, instead we found a decoration of two old, bespectacled mice, rugged up and sitting on a bench arm in arm and sharing a warm pretzel. Now they sit on our side table, where can’t help but smile and dream about all the Christmas to come. To dream of the future arm-in-arm, with sweet treats and the simplicity of enjoying the season and each other’s company.
In these small moments, I had felt something shift. Now we leave the warm lights of the tree on every night, because it’s a warm and beautiful sight during Dan’s early morning wake up routine. I have started putting just a couple of gifts under the tree. It warms my heart to think, that I can with a few small things generate some excitement in our life, and tell my husband, through a few little things ‘I see you and I am grateful’ and I smile every time I think of them. I know that Dan is much to busy, and mental load is heavy to do the same. And that’s ok - we’ve begun and I look into the future and I know, it just takes a small decision to move past apathy and start a tradition that brings joy. For me it was to buy the tree, and honestly…it has been magic.
Oh, and by the way - A few days a go Dan surprised me with my Christmas present early. We’re going to the Christmas Markets in Vienna - The Christmas spirit has been caught, and I cannot wait to see what Christmas looks like for us in another year.
