Christmas Past: Decorating the House

A few weeks ago while channel-hopping, I happened upon an interview Conan O’Brien was conducting with an American actress who is married to a Brit. I don’t remember names, but I remember Conan making some kind of slight about the way Brits celebrate Christmas, as if they hardly celebrate it at all. Now, of all the late-night hosts, Conan is the one most likely to make me laugh (the boy band parody he did some years ago was hilarious). However, this time, he made me grumble. Yes, the Brits don’t go for a lot of showy lights and lawn displays (or they didn’t when I was living there), but they know how to decorate and have fun as much as anyone. This inspired me to share some Christmas celebration memories from my childhood with you. And I especially encourage my Brit readers to chime in and dispel this notion that the Brits are all just fuddy-duddies with no idea how to celebrate Christmas.

From as far back as I can remember through to the last Christmas I spent at home in the UK, we decorated the living room for Christmas. That’s right–just the living room. Our house was not huge: three bedrooms (one master bedroom, one which easily housed two beds, and one that was definitely single-occupancy only), one bathroom, one toilet, a living room, a kitchen, and a small dining area adjoining the kitchen. The living room was our family gathering place, and we had a limited supply of decorations, so we concentrated our festive efforts in that room.

We re-used the same decorations every year. Okay, so we may have added one or two over the years, but the main decorations were the same. Not because we were miserly, but because they kept in good condition and we liked them. Decorating would usually begin sometime after the first week of December (having pestered my dad for the previous two weeks to get on with decorating for Christmas). Up until my mid-teen years, my dad was the main decorator. We had paper garlands (sort-of like the one in the picture on the left) that hung from corner to corner, and then from each corner into the center of the ceiling. In the middle, we had an open-out paper bell or two. We might also incorporate streamers into the mix. I’m sure one year I made a colorful paper chain that we used. In any case, when my dad had finished, the living room was transformed. You just felt Christmas was right around the corner. The excitement level was taken up another notch. And the room felt so much emptier when we took them down three or four weeks later.

But that’s not all! We had a tree too. Not a real tree, but a good tree. In fact, that tree lasted for as long as I can remember living in the UK, so at least twenty years. I’m pretty sure my mum has since got rid of it, but for all the time I was living in the UK, we had the same non-real tree. Non-real–I’m loathe to call it “fake” or “imitation.” Those terms imply it was trying to be a real tree, but without quite being convincing enough. No, there was no mistaking that it was not-real. It was about six feet tall, with fold out silver branches. From the branches hung thin strips of blue, white, and silver plastic, like long, droopy pine needles. It wasn’t even pretending to be real. And the terms “fake” and “imitation” might suggest that we would have preferred a real tree. But I don’t ever recall asking my parents why we couldn’t have a real tree. We loved our blue-white-silver sparkly tree. My dad would set it up in the living room (usually about mid-way along the side wall), and we would help mum decorate with baubles and tinsel. Some years there would be chocolate decorations that we would eat over the course of the season. For some reason I don’t recall whether it was a star or an angel we put on top. I’m inclined to think it was an angel, but I don’t remember. And of course we had lights on the tree–“fairy lights” as they call them over there. Did we use colored lights, or just white lights? I think we had colored lights, but again, I might be mis-remembering.

Sometime in my mid-teens, I asked my dad when he would be putting up the Christmas decorations, and he replied (something along the lines of), “Why don’t you do it?” Yes, this was the handing of the baton. From that time on, I no longer asked, “When are you putting the decorations up,” but rather, “Is it okay for me to put the decorations up now?” I had watched my dad do it for years, and so I was able to replicate his work without any trouble. I may have attempted a few minor deviations, but mostly kept to using the same decorations in the same locations. There’s something comforting in the familiar. Isn’t that why we love traditions? And why change often makes us uncomfortable.

Nothing lasts forever (so they say). I’m now living in the States, where we have a real tree each year. We have mantle decorations and lights outside. Very little of the way we decorate for Christmas reminds me of my childhood, but we’ve been doing it this way now for nearly twenty years, so this has become my new tradition. My new comfort. The way we signal that Christmas is coming and it’s time to crank up the excitement level.

But I enjoy those memories of decorating for Christmas. How about you? Do you have decorating traditions?