Our Fab-Yule-ous Decorations...

In which the Novelistas tell us about their favourite Christmas decorations!

And if you'd like the chance to win a fabulous Novelistas' book bundle, scroll down to the end of this post and we'll tell you how!

Trisha Ashley

My Santa tree topper is made of painted papier-mâché and is over a hundred years old. I know this, because it was bought with her pocket money by my mother's older sister when she was a little girl, and my mother is now 93... His red suit has faded into a soupy brown over the years, but in a misguided moment Mum tarted him up with glitter glue and a cotton wool beard.

Valerie-Anne Baglietto

My sweet and sorry-looking little snowman has graced the mantelpiece during the festive season for several years now, since my daughter ‘adopted’ it at her primary school Christmas fayre. Another child had made it anonymously, but out of all the other sock snowmen for sale it was the one my little girl chose to bring home, and somewhere along the line it lost an eye, yet that only makes it more precious. I wish that anonymous child somewhere could know that their creation found a good home with us, but I suppose that child is a stroppy teenager by now who might not care (although secretly in their heart, I hope they do!)

Annie Burrows 

I don't have a favourite ornament. But every year I do tend to pick up a few new ones. This year's addition to my Christmas collection is this cute Santa doormat!

Sophie Claire

Many years ago, before I was married, my future mother-in-law taught me how to make these hand-sewn decorations. Back then my day job wasn’t creative, so I was thrilled when after a couple of hours I had made something – and that’s when I caught the sewing bug.

Over the years I’ve moved on to bigger projects like patchwork quilts, but each Christmas I return to making these little decorations. I love to personalise them, picking fabrics with particular friends and family in mind, and when the children were small they used to help too, cutting out circles of fabric.

Making these decorations has become an important part of my Christmas preparations and I really look forward to cosy evenings spent stitching in front of the fire.

Beth Francis

In the late 1940s, a group of young German children were brought from their bombed-out cities to my home town to stay with local families for a few months. My grandmother looked after two of them.

They never forgot her, and every Christmas they would send a card with a small gift for her grandchildren. One year there was an advent calendar, rare here at that time; no one else in our street had one. Another year we were sent a tiny doll. Dressed with scraps from my mother’s sewing box, she has topped our Christmas tree ever since. She’s old and faded, but conjures up so many memories of Christmas over the past seventy years that she’s irreplaceable.

June Francis

Last year I visited Liverpool's Anglican cathedral shop just before Christmas and my eyes alighted on these bright sparkling miniature glass Christmas trees. I just had to have one. After buying one, I thought my tree lacked an angel, so I went around the shop and discovered a host of angels. I chose Angel Florence, thinking of my father's sister Florence who was found drowned in the Leeds Liverpool canal during the Second World War.

My middle name is Florence and I like to think of my aunt looking out for me, my sort of guardian angel.

Juliet Greenwood

The Christmas decoration with special memories is the fairy that stood on the top of each Christmas Tree for as long as I can remember. Since I was a little girl, it was always tied on first, before the tree went up. Then came the lights, followed by the tinsel and the rest of the decorations. Those old family Christmases have long gone, but I have inherited the fairy, along with some of the other decorations, which are now interspersed with ones I’ve collected over the years. So the day the fairy goes up on top of the tree is still the day Christmas begins.

Cheryl Lang

My favourite Christmas ornaments are two snowmen and a later addition of a little girl. This is me being sentimental. When my first son arrived, he was only a couple of months old for his first Christmas, so we had to have a tree. I began collecting baubles and I found a jolly snowman and decided this was his special one. Some years later when son number 2 arrived, I remembered the snowman and amazingly found another one. Go forward a number of years, my daughter arrived and before her first Christmas I found this little girl with blonde plaits. This, I imagined might be how she’d look in a few years’ time.

Louise Marley

When I was little my father would take me everywhere - probably to give my poor mother a break - and I can remember going into a petrol station when I was about four, seeing this Nativity scene and falling in love with it. I don't know why. Perhaps I thought it was some kind of dolls' house. But my father bought it for me and I spent many happy hours playing with it - until I was told it had to be packed away because it was a 'Christmas decoration'! But it came out again the following year, and the year after that, and perhaps this is why it has lasted so many years. The Star of Bethlehem fell off very quickly, to be replaced by a milk bottle top, and at some point I lost one of the sheep. And a few years back my husband accidentally crunched it underfoot! But a bit of Superglue later and it was soon as good as new!

Related Posts:

All I Want for Christmas (Group Post)

Rum Cake and Tinsel (Trisha Ashley)

A Christmas Gift from The Novelistas! (Group Post)

How Grandma Invented Christmas (Louise Marley)

Christmas Traditions (Cheryl Lang)

Tips for Being a Domestic Writer-Goddess at Christmas (Group Post)

My Favourite Christmas Tradition (Sophie Claire)

A Satsuma and a Sugar Mouse (Trisha Ashley)

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How Grandma Invented Christmas (with holly, ivy and an awful lot of glitter ... ) by Louise Marley

In our family we owe most of our Christmas traditions to my grandmother, who absolutely loved Christmas, even though she had every reason to hate it. She grew up in extreme poverty and her husband was killed two weeks before Christmas, leaving her with a three-year-old daughter (my mother). Instead, she absolutely embraced Christmas and we still carry on many of the traditions she started.

I grew up in a rambling old house with my two younger brothers, my parents, my grandmother and several assorted dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs and goldfish. My grandmother would make our Christmas decorations by disappearing off into the nearby woods and coming back with bags of all kinds of evergreen foliage, including the ubiquitous holly and ivy. (I think there’s a law against this now; there probably was then). She would outline the leaves in glue, and dunk them in glitter, and then use them to cover the mantelpieces and the tops of the pictures hanging on the wall. And, while infuriating my mother by leaving trails of glitter throughout the house, she would tell us stories about the old Norse gods and explain why we decorate our houses with evergreens at this time of year.

We always had a real Christmas tree, which had to be so big it wouldn’t fit in the sitting room; so we’d have to bend over the top, meaning the fairy spent most of Christmas hanging upside down. Every year my mother would try to find new ways to keep the tree alive, including spraying it with various ‘miracle’ concoctions. In the end, she settled for shoving the tree in a large bucket of water, but every time the dogs pushed past it, wagging their tails, a shower of pine needles would hit the floor and it would be bald by Boxing Day. All the Christmas baubles had been bought individually, some dated right back to the 1940s, and each had its own little story to tell.

My mother began the tradition of Christmas stockings mainly (she admitted to me later) so she’d get a little bit longer in bed on Christmas morning. She and my grandmother would make three Christmas puddings – one for Christmas Day, one for Boxing Day and one for New Year – but my mother refused to hide money inside them, because she thought it was unhygienic. My grandmother got around this by boiling the coins, wrapping them in paper and sneaking them onto our plates when my mother wasn’t looking. We were allowed to unwrap one present in the morning, before heading off to church, and the rest of the presents would be opened after listening to the Queen’s Speech.

I never questioned any of these traditions until I left home and had a family of my own. Obviously I couldn’t raid the local woods for holly so I bought it from the local garden centre. Sadly the berries were plastic and tied on. The mistletoe had been imported from France and was a strange yellow colour and, as soon as I got it home, all the berries dropped off. So that tradition didn’t last long! Because my mother had never let me near fairy lights in case I electrocuted myself (some of them were pre-war, so she probably had a point), I had no idea how to decorate a tree (I still don’t) but I did carry on the tradition of buying each Christmas bauble individually so it has a story to tell.

My husband just laughed when I suggested we make our children wait until after the Queen’s speech to open their presents, and we ended up with an artificial Christmas tree after realising my six-month-old daughter, who had just begun to crawl, would end up stabbing herself on the shrivelled-up pine needles. And no one likes Christmas pudding, so now we make mince pies instead.

So I guess that is what Christmas traditions are all about. You keep some, you adapt others and finally you create new ones to suit your own family.

Now, where’s that glitter …

Louise Marley is the author of Something Wicked - out now!

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Christmas Traditions by Cheryl Lang

I don’t think we have any Christmas traditions in our family, probably because I was brought up in East Africa and Christmas was a vague event.

Cheryl

We often lived in remote places with no shops for hundreds of miles.  My parents, in hindsight, had to purchase any gifts either back in the UK on leave or during the long voyage out by sea. How they managed to gather a few toys together when we didn’t have UK leave, I’ll never know.  

We didn’t have any Christmas decorations, nor did we make any. I never knew what a Christmas tree was. We certainly didn’t have Christmas cards to give. My brother and I were told stories of Santa and of snow and ice and reindeer and sleighs, and I could imagine it. We did hang stockings up on Christmas Eve as we knew Father Christmas would visit us.  We never thought to question how.

Christmas Day was a little unusual. We’d wake up and find a stocking miraculously filled with toys. We never questioned where they came from. Toys were rare. We usually used our environment as our playground and were happy with that. There was no special Christmas Dinner with Turkey and the trimmings. We weren’t aware of the turkey tradition. We probably had a homemade curry. We also kept scrawny chickens that I looked after and were pets with names. Unknown to me, we ate one of them one year. When I found out I was devastated.  

Sometimes when we lived in a more populated area the children, home from boarding schools, were gathered together at the Country Club and we rehearsed a play that we performed to an appreciative audience. I don’t recall any Christmassy ones. One year we did ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin.’ Afterwards, I recall the shock of Father Christmas visiting with a sackful of toys and a named present for every child. 

My Favourite Christmas Tradition by Sophie Claire

I remember attending a marriage preparation course once where the facilitator said: “You’re weeks away from getting married, knee-deep in organising photos and cake and table decorations. Well, today we’re going to put all that to one side and focus on what marriage is really about.”

There was an audible sigh of relief around the room, and that feeling is what I get when, on Christmas Eve, we meet our good friends and head for the hills. 

Our two families go for a long walk usually in the Pennines, occasionally in the snow, and then back home for soup and bread. Afterwards, we sit around chatting over cups of tea while the children hang out.

It’s deliberately simple, and that’s what I love about it. Time out from preparing gifts and food, from fretting over decorations and frippery. Just family and friendship.

And isn’t that what this time of year should be about?