venta

Home for Christmas. What's the reference book latin-short-thingy which means "we've already discussed this earlier in the book, go back and read it if you need to"? Ibid, or passim, or something nothing like them.

Anyway, Christmas preparations, other years, they're quite similar.

Same jokes...
Mum: Oh, and I must go and see Wayne.
Dad: Is that Wayne in a Manger?
Mum: No, you silly bugger, Wayne in the Post Office.

Yesterday was time to ice the Christmas cakes which the mother had already baked and almond-iced. She did the bits that require the ability (like actually icing them) and I did the fun, messy parts like boiling up apricot glue and dying the leftover fondant icing green. It's impossible to dye icing to a proper holly-green, but bilious holly leaves on your Christmas cake is one of those traditions that I feel ought to be observed. Preferably in conjunction with bilious pink holly berries. We have them both, largely because I was left in control of the food colouring.

My uncle's cake gets royal icing, ours gets fondant. They both have ludicrous outbreaks of holly leaves because I was let loose with the teenytiny biscuit cutters the mother keeps for doing things with icing. Both are safely stowed in the spare bedroom to make sure they are safe from cat pawprints, dust, me, etc.

So where are the photos of the cakes, you might cry ? I'm afraid I can't publish them for health reasons.

My health, that is. As far as I can tell, the mother spends Christmas in a state of gibbering terror, fearing that at any moment the Sugarcraft Police will burst through the door and arrest her for crimes against Christmas cakes. She does not yet appear to have worked out that, so long as our cakes are made of cake, neither us nor the uncle care if the icing is billiard-table flat, the lettering is point-perfect or the holly leaves are the correct shade of bilious green.

The cake has never yet failed to taste nice, and I'm assuming this year is no exception. By tomorrow evening (or maybe the day after, depending on turkey consupmtion) we will be enoying it as God intended, with large slabs of Wensleydale cheese. However, posting pictures of the cakes on the internet - with their icing a few microns out in one direction or another - may well result in me being found in a ditch on Boxing Day having mysteriously commited suicide with a strand of tinsel.

Today was, of course, time to put the decorations up in the house. For the last few weeks, No.23 has been looking as it if belongs to the most Scroogiest of Jehovah's Witnesses. By this evening, however, our house is en fete with a tree, snowflakes in the window, a wreath on the gates and sparkly things everywhere.

This year, we have a rather smaller tree than usual. It seems that, when my parents wombled over to the Christmas tree farm in Croft, there'd been an uncharacteristic run on trees of the size we wanted. The options were tiny, or massive. Followers of this journal might be slightly surprised to hear that the parents opted for tiny - rather than massive plus some form of power tool to reduce its size - but this year we have a bijou tree in our front room.

It seems to be a sad fact that our bauble collection is moving more and more into the recent past. Baubles purchased in the last 10-15 years are mostly plastic, resilient and bouncable. The old friends from my childhood are more fragile, and slow attrition is eventually ensuring that they don't appear each year. I'm usually back in Oxford for Twelfth Night, so I don't see which decorations make it safely back into the packaging for next time. Today, I missed the huge purple bauble, vintage 1950s, and the soap-bubble glass bauble I bought when little; apparently they were both casualties in early January last year.

Into the centre of the small but surprisingly dense tree went the family treasure, the unassuming gold bauble. It's tiny, and is buried every year in the darkest, most closely packed branches. It is, the mother has always told me, the first bauble her family bought when such things became available again after the end of WWII. It's glass, and even feels frail and flimsy to touch.
	Hanging boldly in the open, on the other hand, are the plastic decorations which came from the set of ornaments which hung on the tree in my Dad's family home. I put these together this year while worrying that Bakelite fatigue might have set in; they still seem quite resilient, though, and remain one of my favourites.
By contrast, this year's new bauble went to the top of the tree. Bought to replace the broken purple giant which has held sway as long as I can remember, it seems light but robust compared to its predecessor.
	We still have tree decorations with long and glorious histories. In recent years, we have had bushier trees which have solved the annual fights we had with the Awkward Snowman. In my childhood, hanging this fellow on the tree was a pitched battle - no matter what you did, or how you planned it, he spun round on his string to face the wall. Christmas after Christmas went by with us eating turkey to his greenly flocked back. However, this year he is again lodged against a branch and facing into the room.
On the flimsier branches, we hang things which we know will bounce. In gold and blue, we have the baubles which hung on the lower branches of my adoptive-grandparents' tree. The upper branches displayed all sorts of baubles; the lower had to be strictly catproof for the days Smokey Joe came visiting from next door. The resident feline here has rarely bothered with the tree, and can be trusted not to attack dangling shiny things.
	We also have baubles whose origin I don't know. Some look, to me, decidedly seventies. I don't know if they were inherited, bought, or merely turned up.
Our tree always has a star, not an angel. Sometime in the 90s I made a multi-coloured star from the cut-out bits left over when my Dad made crackers. Since then we've had a silver filigree star, and before that (I think) a costume jewellery Maltese Cross. This year the mother has acquired a new snowflake-star which is lashed on with a silver twist-closer.

There are baubles I remember buying on Christmas shopping trips to Newcastle with my godmother, an Erisian golden apple which turned up a few years ago, and some charity baubles which loudly proclaim 1989. There are some unfamiliar sheeny blue baubles, and three which are best (or, according to the mother, best not) described as "pearlescent snot" colour on whose origins everyone professes ignorance.

As a whole, our tree is small, overcrowded and riotous. Sophisticated, co-ordinated trees are for shops and hotels: I have hung up memories and stories with nearly every decoration which has gone onto it.

Pintwatch would like to say that it thoroughly endorses the Badger Brewery's Blandford Fly. Mind you, Pintwatch confesses to being an absolute sucker for any form of beer with ginger in it.

Happy Christmas, all.