An Eclectic Mix

It’s the first Sunday in December so it must be time for Storytelling Sunday.  As it’s the pre-Christmas season, let’s go get ourselves a glass of warmed mulled wine while I get myself organised.  Can I interest you in a mince pie too?  Freshly baked and still warm, that’ll get us in the mood!

It’s also the day after the Eclectic Keepsakes crop and boy what a fun filled action packed day we had.  Not one – not two – but three fab classes, festive cupcakes, and boxes with little chocolate surprises inside.  So while I think of a story to tell I’ll show you what we did in the first class.  Now this would be an excellent way of doing an abridged version of Journal Your Christmas.  A double paged layout by Debbie Jewell – a countdown to Christmas. 

 

Each number had a little acetate pocket attached so you can either slip a small photo from each day inside it or add a few words of journaling – brilliant!  As the background was on gridlined paper, the instructions read a little bit like a crossword puzzle – 1 across and 2 down …

So the story then.  Well.  It’s about this time of year that we start thinking about putting up the Christmas tree.  And I have a trio of clear memories about that from when I was younger.  Mum loved to decorate the tree and was very particular about the size and shape.  Had to almost touch the ceiling once the fairy was on the top and had to be a proper triangular tree shape.  She would pick out the tree from the local greengrocers and then me and my dad would walk into town at the weekend, collect it and carry it home.  It was about a mile which is long enough when carrying a spiky, unwieldy tree.  One year it seemed to become particularly heavy; I was in front carrying the top end and Dad was behind me in charge of the root end.  Only when I turned round to see if he was walking as fast as me as it seemed to be dragging from his end, I saw that he had let go and was eating a pear from the bag of shopping we had also picked up from the green grocers.  I was not amused!

Then there was the year that we brought the tree home, put it into it’s bucket of earth and left it in the lounge for the branches to settle while we went into the dining room to have dinner.  Only when we opened the lounge door later, the room was full of little flying insects that must have been in the branches and had come to life in the warmth of the house.  Mum was not amused.  The lounge had to be sprayed within an inch of it’s life with fly killer and you needed a safety mask and goggles to go in there.

There were set rules to the decorations, after Christmas each decoration was taken down and wrapped in tissue paper, the tinsel had to go in special paper to stop it tarnishing and the unwrapping of them the next year was part of the magic of putting up the tree.  Little chocolates wrapped in coloured foil would be hung from the branches so that one could be unwrapped each day leading up to Christmas day and even the dog was catered for with little sugar mice tied onto the branches here and there.  There was one year that we spent ages decorating the tree, admired it from inside the lounge, went outside to see how it looked through the window and once we were satisfied that everything was just so, we went into the other room to watch tv.  Probably the Generation Game.  Which was disturbed by a large crash.  We ran into the lounge to be met by a rather guilty looking dog, covered in pine needles and tinsel with a sheepish expression on her face and a sugar mouse hanging out of her mouth.  Temptation had been too great and we must have tied one slightly too low and within her reach.  A slight doggy strength tug and the whole tree came down.

Does anyone else have any tree related memories?