Tag: Christmas

We interrupt this blog series to bring you a small Christmassy treat

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Christmas tree decoration representing a shooting star

There’s a little Stancester snippet in the IReadIndies A Very Sapphic Christmas anthology. If you were wondering how things went between Speak Its Name and The Real World, this fills in a little bit of the gap. It also addresses the perennial question: why do we do Christingles, anyway? It’s one of nineteen stories and excerpts by authors from the IReadIndies collective, and you can download the whole thing here.

I’ll also be making it available to newsletter subscribers as a standalone in the new year (read: when I’ve had a chance to find a nice photo to make a cover). If you’re not already subscribing to my newsletter, you can sign up here.

Meanwhile, the books themselves are both in the Smashwords End of Year sale. Speak Its Name is free and The Real World is half price. Find them here.

I’ll be back later with today’s decoration, whatever that ends up being. In the meantime – enjoy!

Daily Decoration: the Holy Parakeets

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Playmobil tree with two parrots and a toucan perched on the branches, in front of a Playmobil Nativity stable.

More Playmobil – and possibly not the last I’ll share, either. These birds are an unofficial addition to the crib scene. They were a present from Anne a few years ago. Because she likes birds. And because Tony likes bad puns, possibly. (I mean, he does. I just don’t know whether the Holy Parakeet one was in play from the start.) I don’t know. Do we need a reason?

As is probably obvious, I don’t have anything terribly clever to say today. I seem to have used up most of my brain doing edits on a short story, and that’s perhaps more than I’d hoped. I had said to the editors that I was aiming to get it back to them before Christmas, but I thought that was optimistic at the time. Now it’s done – and so am I.

But that’s fine. We’re nearly, nearly there.

Daily Decoration: Christmas tree

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Undecorated, bushy evergreen tree standing in the corner of a room.

This morning the sitting room curtain rail fell down. That made me ten minutes later logging in to work than I could have been, and I was already a quarter of an hour later than I’d meant to be. This evening I logged out and went straight to bed. Now I’m sitting on the sofa in a room with an undecorated tree and a candle burning in the curtainless window. There’s always space for a little more chaos, particularly at this time of year.

I could claim that the tree is deliberately bare, and that wouldn’t be entirely untrue. Tradition in the Jowitt household used to be that there was one grand decorating session on Christmas Eve. And some years it’s been fairly crucial for my sanity to still be hanging on in Advent while everyone around me was three Secret Santas in. But it wouldn’t be entirely true, either, because I think the actual idea was to decorate it yesterday.

But there’s time. There’s time. The truth hidden in the (sacred and secular) admonitions to ‘Get ready!’ is that I’m not really expected to be ready yet.

There’s time. One of the first things I did after I finally logged in this morning was to request holiday for tomorrow. I had time just sitting there: granted, I could carry it over to next year, but why do that, when I’d really appreciate it now? I’ll use it to make mince pies. Or pierniczki. Or write. Or read. Or watch something. Or go for a walk. Or maybe just sleep. And perhaps we’ll decorate the tree – or perhaps we really will leave it for Christmas Eve.

Daily decoration: crib, waiting

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Playmobil stable with ox, doves and a mouse

The crib is out. Half the figures aren’t in it yet, of course: all the humans, and the donkey, camel, and sheep, are dispersed around the bookcases, making their way there at their own pace. The angel and the baby Jesus are still in the box.

Speaking of boxes, that’s a rather ignominious thing the stable is standing on. Normally it goes on top of the piano, but given the cat’s predilection for knocking small objects to the floor and chasing them, it seemed safer to have it in a place that’s harder for her to get at: on top of a box on top of a bookcase between the radio and some greetings cards that really ought to have been recycled by now. As it happens, that shoebox also contains instruments, but it’s small, obnoxious things like sleigh bells and the Otamatone.

There is, of course, an obvious point to be made about the placement of the crib. Not in pride of place, under the glare of the purple lamp, but set back, somewhere safer, more hidden. Somewhere you don’t see it, straight away. Somewhere you have to look for it.

Daily Decoration: Christmas card bauble

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Bauble covered in overlapping cardboard scales in shades of gold, deep blue and pale pink

I made this bauble. That is, I punched out hundreds of little leaf shapes from the previous year’s Christmas cards and pinned them onto a polystyrene ball and stuck an eyepin into the top of the ball and threaded string through the eyepin.

There is surely enough polystyrene in the world already. The punch is not what it once was. And three Christmas cards saved from the bin isn’t really going to make much of a difference.

Meanwhile, if I were going to pay myself minimum wage for making this it would be well into double digits of pounds.

It’s a failure in pretty much every dimension – except for one. It is pretty. No, two. I enjoyed doing it.

I think there’s something worth finding in the pleasure of making something, or growing something, or writing something. This year I’ve been writing to please myself. Nothing worthy. Nothing that’s going to make my fortune. Just what I want to write, because I want to write it. Maybe I’ll say more about that another day. And maybe I won’t.

Daily Decoration: blue and white and gold house

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Flat ceramic Christmas tree decoration representing a tall house with Dutch gables, with doors and windows picked out in blue and gilt

This one came from an art shop in Cambridge. I think I’d just gone in to look at the art, with the intention of buying a card or two as the price of admission, but I saw this and I couldn’t not buy it. There was a whole street’s worth of houses, but I couldn’t really justify buying more than one. I bought this one. I love blue-and-white china (there’s more to come in this series), and the addition of gold makes it really lovely.

Of course, I was so terrified of breaking it that I wrapped it up very securely and tucked it away in my handbag and had forgotten all about it by the time I got home. I’m not sure that it actually made it onto the tree that year; if it did, it was at the very last minute.

I try to go and look at something once a week. (Blame Julia Cameron, probably.) Sometimes I manage it; sometimes I don’t. Sometimes it’s an exhibition; sometimes it’s a show; sometimes it’s a concert or a film. Sometimes, as here, it’s a shop that sells particularly beautiful things. Sometimes it isn’t really looking at something: it’s trying something new (an interesting looking cake, a different kind of tea, a book of poetry). Often I bring something away with me. Usually it’s something that can be stuck in my diary: a flyer, a bookmark. Sometimes it’s something that will allow me to explore the subject further: a book. Sometimes it’s something more substantial, something that’s part of the the something itself. Even if it’s tiny.

Daily Decoration: distance pigs

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Six small ceramic pigs with loops on their backs for hanging, lined up under a lamp

I can’t be in two places at once. Nor can anybody else. Even at Christmas. It is for this reason that in the early years of this century I started buying identical pairs of decorations, one for the tree at my father’s house and one for the tree at my mother’s.

As I and my brothers have acquired partners, who also have families and trees, the number of different places where we all could be has necessarily multiplied. So, therefore, has the number of decorations. This year there are six little pigs, one for our tree and the rest for other people’s. Just because I liked the little pigs.

This year I’ve seen more of my extended family than I’d expected, though not as much as I’d have liked. There has been some lovely news in one part of the family and some awful news in another part. A little china pig isn’t much, to say, ‘thinking of you, missing you, lots of love, maybe I’ll be with you next Christmas’. But it’s something.

Daily Decoration: childhood crib

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olive wood Nativity crib scene, with the stable on its back in a shoebox and the figures within it, plus some other items including a plastic elephant, ostrich and phoenix
I’m visiting family at the moment. Mine not to reason why, but the shoebox containing the Christmas crib was on the kitchen table, so here it is.

This olive wood Nativity scene was a fixture of childhood Christmases, and I’ve yet to find one that I like quite so much. Oh, there’s always a bit of a debate about which of the Magi should actually be a shepherd, and baby Jesus is sellotaped into the manger, but next to this all the sets on the market seem tacky, juvenile, or both. (Not a word against my Playmobil set, which is, after all, a toy.)

There have been a few additions over the years. The violinist angel came from my aunt in Germany. One or other of my brothers added the ostrich and the elephant. And I think the phoenix and the dragon that you can’t quite see down the side of the stable were my fault. When it comes to it, our commitment to tasteful understatement tends to come second to a slightly childish sense of humour. But after all, why shouldn’t there be an elephant?

Daily Decoration: Tree-Top Angel

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A Christmas decoration representing an angel, in a plastic tube. She has ceramic head an hands, gold fabric wings, and a white satin robe.

This little angel has been sitting up on top of the bookcase ever since last Christmas – well, last Epiphany, I suppose, when we took the tree down.

She was waiting to be mended: she’s a ceramic bust attached to a plastic cone, with the joins covered up by her robe, and the glue had failed. Since her head is quite a bit heavier than her body, she was tending to tilt alarmingly.

She’s done very well, considering what we paid for her. I can’t remember what we paid for her. Less than what I spent on St Etheldreda, certainly. She came from one of those fantastic shops that sell all sorts of tat extremely cheaply and also do mobile phone repairs. This one was called Circle 7 and was on the market square in Woking. The delightful innocence of its staff can be evidenced by the fact that I once found furry handcuffs displayed in the toy section, along with the cowboy hats and water pistols. I didn’t buy any of those things. I was probably looking at stickers. I’d imagine it’s no longer there: I think that whole section of the town has been redeveloped in recent years. We left in 2013, which makes this little angel at least nine years old, possibly more.

I finally got around to fixing her on Monday evening. Lately I’ve been enjoying fixing things. Darning, mostly. There’s something rather satisfying about transforming a garment from ‘unwearable’ to ‘wearable’. But I’ve fixed the angel, too. Just a bit of superglue put her head securely back on her body.

Now she’s waiting for the Christmas tree.

December Reflections 25: love is…

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waxing gibbous moon seen just below the edge of a wooden porch, which has blue and green fairy lights twined around the beam

I have been writing, on and off, for the last three years at least, about what love is and what love looks like, and this year it’s looked very odd indeed. Staying away from people. (I’ve heard all the introvert jokes, and made quite a lot of them.) I spoke to most of my family earlier: they were eating Christmas dinner outside, in the teeth of a bracing sea breeze off the English Channel. Meanwhile, I continue to lurk in the Fens like Hereward the Wake.

Love doesn’t always look the way we expect it to. I think this is something I learn over and over – but how much more so this year?