The Christmas tree - a fashion statement?
When I was sixteen (many moons ago I’m afraid) I went to a Christmas party with a bunch of other girls. I had made an effort. My hair, taken up high in the fashion of that time was dotted with glittering gold pins. My dress was a gleaming green with gold lurex threads through it. On my feet were gold high-heeled shoes. My eyelashes fluttered with glittering bits of something and my eye shadow made it seem as though a couple of rose chafers were happily hibernating on my eyelids; from my earlobes dangled earrings, fake emerald and ruby in some gold-coloured setting. My handbag was a gold-coloured clutch bag. In those days we didn’t know the word ‘bling’. It hadn’t yet become an acceptable, if somewhat cynical fashion accessory.
Before I left for a frolicsome evening I went in to see my parents. My dad, in his armchair, put his newspaper down, looked at me over his spectacles. His look seemed non-committal for a moment but his comment was unequivocal. ‘Bloody hell! You look like a Christmas tree.’
I sniffed, drew myself up to my full height and picked up my coat. I made the gesture of leaving the house in high dudgeon but I was not really annoyed. After all, what could a fusty father know about fashion, especially Christmas party fashion? My mum uttered a few notes of doubtful approval of my apparel and as the door closed, I heard her telling my father off for being so hidebound.
Truth to tell, I can say, looking back, that his judgment was probably spot-on. It is more than likely that I did look like a Christmas tree. As we girls moved around that evening we must all have looked like a whole bouncing Birnam wood bedecked like sacred pagan evergreens, heavy with votive offerings.
Whether the Christmas tree came in from the cold through the caprice of Prince Albert or an earlier consort Princess Charlotte, it shows a distinct desire of the those of the late-eighteenth-early nineteenth century to tame the wild, to domesticate it, make it pretty. At Christmas it had been, for centuries, the custom to bring in greenery to deck the mantelpiece or table. But bringing in a whole tree is a pretty massive statement. The wild wood, with its own laws that had little to do with those of the farmer, was a place of fear, of awe. Bringing in the tree inside and decorating it tamed the wild folk, the wodwos, even Pan himself.
Nowadays I decorate our Christmas tree according to what is in the box of tree decorations, to what has survived and what has been recently added to. The contents of the box are, like most other people’s, really an ad hoc collection of glass balls, red, gold, green and other colours, angels of glass, straw or porcelain, gold and silver tinsel and of course, lights. Yes, we have small tree candles, but unlike the proper candles that I buy from the nearby abbey and spread around the house, they don’t burn all the time. Like other people, we have small electric lights of red, green and blue. We do have some colourless lights, but I dislike them.
For some reason a naked bulb brings on a mood of intense depression, not quite as awful as that engendered by those blue-tinged energy- saving bulbs but a despairing mood of no-frills functionalism, of earnest and joyless austerity sets in. You can’t reach any lower depths. Perhaps it’s just that everything is stripped of softness, of magic. It makes me think of a waiting room in a shabby provincial bus station, but without the romance.
Yet some people prefer little bare bulbs on trees. ‘We go for the aesthetic approach in Christmas trees,’ I was once told. ‘Only white lights and silver ornaments and those are sparsely and strategically distributed. Anything else is, well, vulgar.’
That’s as may be. I shall continue to decorate my tree with odd, sometimes very odd coloured glass balls, silver birds, glass angels, tinsel, strips of gold and anything that glitters and gleams. Let’s face it – if a Christmas tree can’t look like a Christmas tree, what can?
Before I left for a frolicsome evening I went in to see my parents. My dad, in his armchair, put his newspaper down, looked at me over his spectacles. His look seemed non-committal for a moment but his comment was unequivocal. ‘Bloody hell! You look like a Christmas tree.’
I sniffed, drew myself up to my full height and picked up my coat. I made the gesture of leaving the house in high dudgeon but I was not really annoyed. After all, what could a fusty father know about fashion, especially Christmas party fashion? My mum uttered a few notes of doubtful approval of my apparel and as the door closed, I heard her telling my father off for being so hidebound.
Truth to tell, I can say, looking back, that his judgment was probably spot-on. It is more than likely that I did look like a Christmas tree. As we girls moved around that evening we must all have looked like a whole bouncing Birnam wood bedecked like sacred pagan evergreens, heavy with votive offerings.
Whether the Christmas tree came in from the cold through the caprice of Prince Albert or an earlier consort Princess Charlotte, it shows a distinct desire of the those of the late-eighteenth-early nineteenth century to tame the wild, to domesticate it, make it pretty. At Christmas it had been, for centuries, the custom to bring in greenery to deck the mantelpiece or table. But bringing in a whole tree is a pretty massive statement. The wild wood, with its own laws that had little to do with those of the farmer, was a place of fear, of awe. Bringing in the tree inside and decorating it tamed the wild folk, the wodwos, even Pan himself.
Nowadays I decorate our Christmas tree according to what is in the box of tree decorations, to what has survived and what has been recently added to. The contents of the box are, like most other people’s, really an ad hoc collection of glass balls, red, gold, green and other colours, angels of glass, straw or porcelain, gold and silver tinsel and of course, lights. Yes, we have small tree candles, but unlike the proper candles that I buy from the nearby abbey and spread around the house, they don’t burn all the time. Like other people, we have small electric lights of red, green and blue. We do have some colourless lights, but I dislike them.
For some reason a naked bulb brings on a mood of intense depression, not quite as awful as that engendered by those blue-tinged energy- saving bulbs but a despairing mood of no-frills functionalism, of earnest and joyless austerity sets in. You can’t reach any lower depths. Perhaps it’s just that everything is stripped of softness, of magic. It makes me think of a waiting room in a shabby provincial bus station, but without the romance.
Yet some people prefer little bare bulbs on trees. ‘We go for the aesthetic approach in Christmas trees,’ I was once told. ‘Only white lights and silver ornaments and those are sparsely and strategically distributed. Anything else is, well, vulgar.’
That’s as may be. I shall continue to decorate my tree with odd, sometimes very odd coloured glass balls, silver birds, glass angels, tinsel, strips of gold and anything that glitters and gleams. Let’s face it – if a Christmas tree can’t look like a Christmas tree, what can?
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