Decide where you want the Christmas tree before you decorate it
This isn’t some business metaphor about goals and pivots and finding new markets. This is about moving a fully decorated tree from the back of the house to the front.
Which I’ve just done, with the help of my wife and my two daughters. Mostly my wife, to be honest; the daughters spent more time laughing and making rather unhelpful comments than getting their hands on the tree itself.
As my wife insists on a real tree, the route of the move is now marked with a trail of discarded pine needles, like some nature trail for tiny creatures.
The thing about a decorated tree is that its branches are weighed down and thus spread out more. The spread branches were wider than the doors through which we made it pass, so in addition to the pine needles, we left abandoned decorations in our wake, too. Something for the tiny creatures to play with.
But it’s up now in its new home in the front room instead of at the back of the house in the conservatory we tend to use as a dining room. Trying to eat Christmas dinner with the overbearing — and larger than expected — tree would have been both claustrophobic and almost like eating outside. Eyes could have been lost, too.
Hence the move. Well, it’s done and I’ve left the women to put back the decorations. They do it with love and care as opposed to my throw and see what sticks approach.
My son is not back from university until next week, so he won’t know the struggle he avoided. I’m surprised neither of my daughters wasn’t filming the thing, actually. An opportunity to highlight my eccentricities is rarely missed.
At least it’s a memory of sorts for my children to take with them into later life. I, on the other hand, have few memories associated with trees and Christmas. If I remember correctly, getting the tree was about heading into the attic and bringing down the box in which it lived. We had the same tree for most of my childhood. And most of the decorations on the tree at my parents’ house when I first visited with my eldest daughter were the same ones I had helped put on the tree when I was five or six.
Christmas in our house was like a normal Sunday lunch but with silly hats and crackers. I was an only child and my parents never cared to make friends — especially the sort of friends who might turn up at Christmas — so we struggled to pretend it was a special day and wondered what all the fuss was about.
Happy days.
Our parents are inevitably our first great teachers, so I have struggled over the years to try to make the day a bit more special for my children. My wife comes from a family in which the day was special and always involved an extended family, so that has helped. Most years we are either at a relative or have people here. This year it is just us and that actually makes a nice change. And not just for me. Honestly. Well, the old anti-social father will be here but he will not cast any pall of gloom over proceedings.
And we have the story of the tree move to relate.
