We have put up our Christmas tree.
The house is tidy and clean, with an appropriate number of kitchens, and in the corner there is a Christmas tree.
We bought it from our usual chap, who had been waiting for us. This was because we always pay with the saved-up two pound coin collection, and he had run out of change.
He has some reindeer in the shed with the trees, snorting and making reindeer smells. Occasionally during the festive season he dresses up as an elf and visits schools with the reindeer. When you are a parent you are likely to see him several times over the last few weeks of term, and then not at all for the rest of the year.
He told us that the trees come from Penrith, which made me feel pleased, it is important to have a properly home-grown tree, none of your foreign rubbish here.
This evening we put it up.
I decorated it on my own. I have never done this before, and it was a bit odd. Mark stuck it in the bucket and tied it to the hooks in the ceiling, remarked that it was leaning, and then buzzed off to collect wet firewood from the farm in the dark.
I have got no little children at home to help me. Oliver thought that he would like the house to be decorated when he arrived. Lucy had forgotten about Christmas decorations completely, because of an essay about the Human Rights Act, and of course Numbers One and Two Daughters are long gone with boxes of Christmas decorations of their own.
In fact it turned out to be oddly soothing. We had been in Kendal all afternoon, getting my hair cut and doing what I had hoped would turn out to be the last of the Christmas shopping. I was completely wrong about this, so wrong that we had to go to Booths and buy some forgotten ethical things half an hour after we got back home.
The haircut was cheering. It is nice not to look like the dogs at the end of the winter.
I asked the hairdresser chap about shampoo. This was because I had tried some shampoo and conditioner that was a free sachet, and thought that it made my hair feel lovely. He was not very complimentary about free sachets of shampoo, so I thought I had better say as little as possible about my usual Asda Shampoo With Added Vitamins For Body And An Extra Ten Pence On The Price.
I learned some new things about shampoo, though, which he thought I would not find interesting, but I did. There are some shampoos which just scrub your hair and leave it stripped of all hairy assets, and others which help your hair to be its own Natural Self.
I was not entirely sure that this was a good idea. Whenever anything else about me is allowed to relapse into its natural state I become unpopular quite quickly.
He said that the free sachet probably made my hair feel nice because it covered it in silicone. I thought about the depressing joint between the bath and the tiles and thought that probably this would not be as lovely as I had hoped. All the same I had liked having silicone-coated hair. It had been much nicer to scratch my head than it usually is.
There is a picture of the Christmas tree in our living room. You will be pleased to see that no matter how hard you scrutinise the picture, you will not see a single spare kitchen in it anywhere, just the tree.
We use the same decorations every year, I have a running theme of gold and scarlet, highlighted with green, yellow, blue, pink, orange and red. It was brilliant to get them all out again. There is the snowman who sits on the top of the grandfather clock, and the fairy who is still wearing the hat that she acquired once when Lucy had Archaeologist Barbie for Christmas, and the brilliant, brilliant Christmas stocking, made by Oliver at nursery school. He was two, and a non-speaking child, and yet came home with a paper stocking on which he had painstakingly cut from a catalogue and stuck a picture of a present for everybody. Everybody looked at the presents he had chosen and we thought how perfect they would be for the recipients, and we all looked at Oliver and realised with a shock that despite his determined silence, he had been listening and looking with all of his little heart.
He started to speak not long after that, and after a while we forgot to be enchanted and listened as carefully as you ever listen to whittering toddlers.
I hung lots of chocolate on the tree. The dogs were at the farm with Mark, but as soon as they got back they remembered about Christmas trees and chocolate, and hung about underneath it, hoping that some might fall off. Of course it was not long before some did, and Roger Poopy tried to be very discreet about sidling across to it and taking it to hide for a picnic in his bed later.
There is always lots of chocolate on the tree, and the rascally dogs steal an awful lot of it. There is a lot of chocolate because I am a child of the nineteen seventies when we had socialism, and everybody was very broke all of the time. Now I am a grown up it is important to have so much chocolate on the Christmas tree that you never need to wonder if it is all right to eat some. In fact there were so many lollies on it last year that we have not yet finished eating them even now.
The dogs like Christmas. Last year we thought that they had eaten about fifty Freddos and a kilo of walnuts in their shells. For the concerned, not only were they not noticeably ill, but Roger Poopy’s father is about a hundred years old and has survived his annual Christmas excess into a ripe dotage.
They spit the shells out. This is very tiresome indeed when you are barefoot. Shards of dog-dribble nutshell are not ace to have festooned around your fireside.
‘Tis the season to be jolly. It is upon us.
