We have taken the Christmas tree down.
I am vaguely aware that there is a prescribed date for this activity, but have never felt it to be of any importance, what if I was too busy or didn’t feel like it, or something. We have had the Christmas tree for a month now, and beautiful as it was, we knew today that the holiday was over.
The season is moving on. It is no longer dark at four o’ clock, and I was beginning to feel itchy to make the house feel fresh and clean again. We had a last appreciative coffee next to the tired tree this morning, and then it had got to come down.
Taking the tree down is one of my private rituals.
Once the decorations are down I wash all the dust off them in soapy water and then dry them all thoroughly. Then I coil the lights up and wrap everything else in tissue paper and pack them all very carefully in their own special boxes.
I am leaving a present for me next December. When I come to the Christmas decoration boxes under the stairs I will have the enormous pleasure of finding clean, shiny decorations, all neatly stored and looked after.
There are old friends there, and new, things we have bought on adventures, and things that other people have given to us, mostly with the sentence: “I saw this, and it was so completely tasteless that I thought of you straight away.”
Some of my favourite ones have come with that sentence. This year Elspeth found an Eiffel Tower made out of black and gold lace, like a pair of French knickers: we loved it at once, and hung it next to the glass Orca whale and the plum pudding made out of pinned sequins.
The happiness of rediscovering them year after year never goes away. There are one or two left over from my own childhood, donated by my mother when she decided to have a tasteful, colour co-ordinated tree, but still treasured and hung on our tree every year.
There are several angels made by the children, to their irritation, and I have got to put them at the back of the tree because they are embarrassed about them, and there is the dear fairy, who is still dressed in the cowboy hat that came with Barbie one year: Lucy’s dog jealously killed Barbie, in a fit of agony after Lucy played with it instead of him, but left the hat untouched, and the fairy wore it ever after.
There are countless others, all with their own stories. The thing is, when I come back to them they will be polished, and wrapped, and loved, and I will know that somebody really cared about making sure that my Christmas started off joyfully. It is my annual Christmas present to me.
Mark laughs about this. He says that he could do with somebody leaving a similar present for him in his toolshed. When he comes back to his things they are not usually polished and gleaming and carefully laid down in cherished rows, but covered in oil and dumped all over the place by some rogue who didn’t give a hoot about how he would feel when he found them. Every now and again he goes and has a good organise and tidy up, but he does not leave presents for himself the way I do.
I felt very sad after taking the tree down. Mark cut it up bit by bit as I took everything off it, and fed it into the stove, where it spat and hissed, and flamed bright-hot. It always feels like a very ungrateful thing to do after it has made our lives so happy for the last month, but somehow better than dragging it out to some dump and leaving it to rot. Its last service was to make the house warm, and the ashes will go on the allotment in the spring. Poor tree.
It took ages to get everywhere cleared up and free of needles. We emptied everything out of the cupboard which had been behind it, and scrubbed the dreadful black mould off the walls and out of the cupboard, even the bottom of the dresser was spotted with the stuff. We have got the dehumidifier going all the time, and we are emptying about a gallon of water out of it every day, but still the air is astonishingly damp, and the thought of the spores in the atmosphere makes me shudder with horror at the thought that we are breathing them in: so we are trying hard to keep everywhere bright and as fresh as we can.
I wanted to have something nice in our lives even though the tree was gone, so we emptied all our last pennies out of the skeleton money box, and went down all the seats on the taxis, and took the proceeds to the friendly florist across the road, where we spent absolutely all of it on as many white flowers as we could afford, and arranged them in vases with green stuff out of the garden.
Mark decorated one of the vases with a short string of white Christmas lights, so that we would still have a little bit of the feeling of midwinter brightness, and it looked beautiful. I had expected to feel flat and sad after the tree was gone, but we sat in our rocking chairs and actually everywhere felt spacious and bright and newly-polished. We lit one of the gorgeous spiced Malabar candles, and felt as though the world was still a lovely place after all.
Life is good.
