Bringing home the tree
I had a conversation with some friends at work the other day about real Christmas trees. We decided that the point at which you buy your first real tree for your own home (with lights and baubles and everything) is the point at which you feel truly grown up.
Soâat the age of 34âI am finally an adult. In my previous homes, I was either not around for Christmas, so there didn’t seem much point in getting a tree, or I didn’t have enough space for one. Our last flat was so small that we could only fit in our ‘flat-pack’ tree. This was an outline of a tree, made from wire and woven with sparkly gold twigs. It was slightly more attractive than it sounds, but its main virtue was that we could store it under the bed for the rest of the year.
This year we have plenty of space and we’re at home for Christmas, so I went and chose my first proper tree. Homebase isn’t the most glamorous of settings for such a rite of passage, but it was close enough that I could walk there. Striding home with 1.4 m1 of prime Nordmann fir on my shoulder made me feel rather prehistoric for some odd reason. Not that Palaeolithic people had much use for Christmas trees. I can just picture the conversation:
[Palaeolithic woman, returning to cave] See, husband, I bring a freshly slaughtered Nordmann fir to our cave. The chase was long and arduous.
[Palaeolithic man] Ah, we will feast for many moons on the tender green needles.
1 I’m only 1.57 m tall myself.
1
So the decorating decisions you make this year could set the blueprint for the years to come - and what decisions they are! Will you have a star or a fairy? And... erm... OK, well, that's the only one I can think of! But it's crucial, I'm sure, nonetheless!
So what are you putting on the top?
(And why is it that all WordPress blogs insist on producing my old e-mail address in the automatic E-mail field every time I write a comment, forcing me to change 'hotmail' to 'mac'?)----- Now is this Clan of the Cave Bear or Valley of the Horses?
by jcwinnie @ 18/12/2004 7:13 pm • Permalink •
2
Your cavemen have just made me fall over with laughter
by Caitlin @ 18/12/2004 8:13 pm • Permalink •
3
I have actually been to a get together which was nominally about throwing out the christmas tree, The festive repast was centered around a soup made from the trees pine needles. I am not kidding. I don`t know if this was or is some normal swedish dish, but nobody but me seemed to think it was excessively strange. I stuck to the dessert and alcohol. Perhaps I missed some secret nordic drug experience. By the way, be careful what you decorate your first tree with, you will find that the most bizarre, kitsch, trashy and or casual make-do "temporary" decorations will become a mandatory part of your christmas rite, with or without those ultra conservative guardians of all family ritual, children. merry christmas and happy humbug..
by john @ 19/12/2004 2:13 pm • Permalink •
4
David: A star. In fact it's the same sparkly wooden twig star that used to adorn our sparkly wire Christmas tree, so there's a bit of continuity there. And about the comment fields: it's because a cookie is stored with your settings. Just find cookies with the URL of rousette.org.uk and delete them. You may need to flush the browser cache (in the Omniweb or Safari menu) and refresh the page to get it to reset. In Omniweb, cookies are stored in Preferences > Security > Advanced...
jcwinnie: Oh, I was such a sucker for those books! I don't know if was my flint knapping activities as a kid, but I found them fascinating.
Caitlin: Sorry! :-D
john: Woah... that sounds very odd. I thought I was kidding about eating pine needles.
Our traditions are going to be based on what Homebase had in their '3 for 2' offer. We realised once we got the tree up that our 8 existing decorations weren't going to go very far over a 1.4 m tree, and we went a bit mad. They are at least colour coordinated...
by bsag @ 19/12/2004 5:13 pm • Permalink •
Page 1 of 1 pages