Christmas Tree Decorating

Christmas Tree Decorating is a tradition with many families. It's a heart-warming memorable event, each year, with families working together to make the perfect Christmas Tree!

TIMBER!

By Ashley Cotter-Cairns

My grandparents' house was almost always the focal point for our family Christmas celebrations. The decorations all sat wrapped in tissue paper in wartime-era shoe boxes on a high shelf in their house. Being traditional, they would wait until Christmas Eve before decorating the tree, which was always a real fir.

These decorations were family heirlooms, made back in the days before cheap Chinese plastic became the norm. The baubles were real glass; you had to handle them really carefully. True works of art... or, they WERE. Until the TIMBER! incident of Christmas 1981.

My grandfather had that year decided to make my Nana's life easier by installing a second door out of the kitchen. This gave her a more direct route to the dining room with food in her hands. All very nice, but the new door was positioned exactly where the tree always went.

So, we'd just plugged in the lights and were standing back to admire it, when Nana (who had probably been "sampling" the sherry before adding it to the trifle) came bursting through the new door with a tray of nibbles.

There was no time to react. We all simply watched as the huge tree gathered speed, toppling directly towards the cat, who loved to sit on top of their 1960s TV to keep warm. The tree crashed down, the beautiful, decades-old baubles shattering like grenades. We were picking red, green and blue shrapnel out of the wallpaper for days.

In the aftermath, when everybody was silent and probably the adults were trying not to say anything too rude in front of my tender ears, I smiled and said "Smashing!"

Everybody started laughing and the long clean-up operation began.

p.s. Those SBIers who met Ash at the Chicago SBI conference this past fall can just SEE him saying "Smashing!".. I'm sure!