Features and blogging

I love this bit of the festive season. Social stuff in full flow, mulled wine, tinsel. Insta feeds full of green branches. Stress, OK yes, but baubles and cinnamon making it all better, plus twinkles in every window… We’ve had the odd tricky yule but mainly lovely ones, #luckyus. This year we’re a bit late with things, especially the tree – which brings me to the annual question of fake v fir.
Our family Christmas was always in Cornwall. We gathered holly and ivy from the hedges, mixed up bread sauce from dried loaves, laboured over steamed puds from old written-down recipes, and always ALWAYS had a real tree. Short as possible to allow for our low ceilings, it would stay propped in the porch until Christmas week, then got ushered inside and jammed into the old iron tree stand. The decorating was given to us girls, probably to get us out of the way. Boxes of baubles would be left out pointedly (ie, put ALL of this lot on, please).

Then I married a born expat who’d had a different experience every year. One year he’d be in south London, another year UpNorth, another in Hong Kong, another in Florida, etc. It was unpredictable and exciting, and his family needed a tree that would last, so they bought one. Welcome ‘Florida’ (as I call her, because that’s where she’s from), a huge 1980s fluffy plastic pine.
By the time I had become an addition to the Lawson clan, my father-in-law had taken on the job of dressing the tree (especially during my mother-in-law’s last year, when she wasn’t well enough to do anything other than lie on the sofa and look on). Two boxes from their collection stand out: silver-painted pine cones and cotton wool balls. The latter would be lobbed at the branches by Mister L, from as far across the room as possible, to recreate a snowy ski scene. Our three-year-old loved that.

In my house fake trees were a big “nein”. However, now I’m a grown-up I get to decide. In recent years I’ve found it increasingly heartbreaking to drag a poor naked tree down to the tip, leaving it to shiver in the January cold with all the other forgotten pines. So out comes Florida, unfurling willingly to full fake elegance (slyly dropping more and more needles each year, but hey – realistic).
My bauble collection has been refined and honed down and is now a blend of my family relics, my in-laws’ things, and our newer bits. In pride of place are these four:
• Ceramic Neptune on a wave (thanks Ma)
• Tippexed ‘John’ on a blue bauble c. 1983 (thanks Ma-in-law)
• Stuffed cockroach (Singapore (2014)
• Wooden cut-out (Prague 2017)
This year we’ve tricked the cats by putting the tree in a different room. No dramas yet. In any case, they’re too busy harvesting the annual Dead Rodent Advent Calendar:
(“On the third day of Christmas my kitties caught for me:
One tiny eyeball, two little feet, and a bit of kidney by the Christmas tree.”)

Anyway. No judgement from here on whether you go fake or fir, what you put on the branches, how you dress it, or where you put it. You can even have no tree if you like, I honestly don’t mind. Enjoy this twinkly month if you love it, and big plastic fir-branch hugs if you don’t. You’re welcome to stand on the pavement outside our living room window and watch Mr L pretending to work as he adds more baubles.

Just to prove how much I love Christmas, here are some I wrote earlier:
Me and Christmas shows
Covid Christmas
Another tree post
Christmas cards
Christmas puds
And from an even older blog:
Baubles
Christmas Elvis
Christmas in Singapore