Christmas decorations. Never mind clouds of angels, it’s the clouds of dust as you bring out the box that remains hidden all year.
The art collection that reveals the quality of your handiwork, and the aesthetic instincts of your children. Something like that.
It may instead be your annual reminder of the multiple uses for a toilet roll tube.
An opportunity to spread a little more glitter, along with Christmas cheer, as you remove the items from the box.
And yes, for anyone with hoarding tendencies, it’s the ideal excuse. Make them, keep them, receive a few new ones maybe, every now and then. Choose not to consider quality, throw them back in your container, and ignore them for the next few months.
Are they just a way to distract and occupy over-excited children? Or can they tell you something more about the moments that make up a season – maybe a life?
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Christmas Past
If I strain to visualise it, I can just about see it in my mind’s eye. Making angels out of toilet roll tubes and paper doilies.
Sitting in a primary school classroom, chatting to my friends, fighting over the glue. Occasionally applying it to one’s fingers and dreamily peeling it off as it sets.
Anticipating the end of term, the day to bring in boardgames. (Big excitement. Will someone bring in Operation? Better still, will I get to play it?)
Also just about within reach as a memory: creating an owl out of a fir cone and bits of felt. My granny collected owls at that time. I think it went on her tree, and later came home with me.
Later on, now part of a married couple, rediscovering the homemade decorations aspect of Christmas. Our long hallway was a perfect foil for cardboard snowflakes, strung together with thread. A locked cupboard gained a snowdrift of stars, yellow and red.
The toilet roll angel has gone, I think. I am not sure about the owl (I haven’t unpacked the main decorations yet). Every year, I realise that I have kept earlier banners, and that they may not be making a repeat performance this year.
But they do connect me with a time where making was also about anticipating. Enjoying the excuse to be indoors, warm, and maybe having fun creating something with others.
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Christmas Present
The decorations have come out. I select a few to start us off. And I realise that of course,
it’s not just my decorations, old or verging on antique.
It’s the next generation of Christmas crafts, belonging to Junior Reader. A paper plate wreath that I pin on the inside of our door. (Our part of town is pretty windy. External Christmas wreaths don’t stand much of a chance.)
A Christmas mobile: two reindeer, one Father Christmas in the middle. The reindeer have been hung in such a way that they seem to be bookending Father Christmas rather than facing the same way.
It’s OK. Christmas is about remembering old favourites. And it’s about seeing the passage of time, both yours and that of the junior creators in the family.
The Christmas story is full of frailty, making do. A feed trough instead of a cradle. A stable instead of a home. And our attempts to get to the awe and the amazement of that story are frail too.
That frailty, that making do, didn’t stop the unfolding of the story. Nor does it stop ours unfolding, year on year.
So this year, I see that frailty in the little makes and mementoes of previous years. They are simple treasures, really. We have moved beyond them, and yet we still want them to be part of us.
They may be poor imitations: of stars, of angels, and more. But we choose to keep them,
to bring them out again, to dust them down and put these younger parts of ourselves on display.
And to treasure who we have been, as well as who we are now.