My husband calls me the Grinch for not wanting our Christmas tree up yet. But this is unjustified as I love, love, LOVE Christmas. I just want Christmas, to feel like Christmas⌠when itâs actually Christmas.
Nowadays, it seems no sooner have the pumpkins and skeleton masks been whipped off the store shelves; Christmas crackers and family-size buckets of Celebrations swiftly replace them. Seriously, an unscheduled trip to the shops last month saw me walking amongst the glittering aisles, listening to Frosty the Snowman, feeling like Iâd entered some sinister parallel universe.
Yep, in my opinion, weâre starting to lose the magic of the silly-season because itâs all starting too bloody early. And to those who put the tree up in November â youâre killing Christmas!
Itâs not that I donât want to decorate the tree with the kids and rearrange it as soon as theyâre in bed, because I do. After all, who doesnât swoon at pretty fairy-lights? Itâs just that I canât help thinking that having the tree up ridiculously early kind of dilutes all the magic and the anticipated ceremony of it all: a glass of wine in one hand, mince pie in the other and Fairytale of New York on repeat.
As a Brit kid back in the day, our tinsel-laden tree went up a week before Christmas and not a second before. If it was just down to me â thatâs how I would run the show now. The entire Christmas period was condensed into two weeks and because of that, felt just so⌠Christmassy! Plus we had a real tree back then which would otherwise have been dead by Christmas Eve.
So yet again hubs and I find ourselves (north) poles apart on this pressing issue of when to put up the tree and set-up our expanding âChristmas villageâ display (his pride and joy). He declares weâre already way behind schedule but Iâm pushing for 15 December. Weâre not really religious but to set our squabbling aside (not very Christmassy), I start to think about some other meaningful ways of preserving the spirit of Christmas for us and our boys.
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I love putting up the tree, but rarely have time before 18th or 19th of December, of course if I buy a freshly cut tree, this means it isn't dead by Christmas., but the real reason is I want to enjoy taking time to put on the decorations collected over the years and reminisce over them and this is when I have got through the busiest end of year celebrations and can enjoy doing it instead of seeing it just as another job to do before Christmas.
Who actually even cares when anyone else puts their Christmas tree đ up? To quote my 17 yr old...âyou do you, booâ and stop worrying about the Jonesâs or anyone else. Put the damn thing up whenever you feel like it! Growing up our tradition was to put it up 12 days before Christmas and take it down 12 days after. To be totally honest this sat well with me as I hate the mess of a Christmas tree. All the bloody tinsel, glitter & little green bits that end up everywhere drive me crazy! I carried this tradition on when my children were small but at almost 18 & 23, these days we have the teeniest, tiniest tree (often we are overseas for Christmas so it needs to fit in a suitcase) and guess what!?! It still looks beautifully fabulous & magical every Christmas morn with all the presents underneath it :)